An Introduction to Political Philosophy

Product Information

Publishers description: Written in 1833-4, when Marx was barely twenty-five, this astonishingly rich body of works formed the cornerstone for his later political philosophy. In the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, he dissects Hegel’s thought and develops his own views on civil society, while his Letters reveal a furious intellect struggling to develop the egalitarian theory of state. Equally challenging are his controversial essay On the Jewish Question and the E conomic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx first made clear his views on alienation, the state, democracy and human nature. Brilliantly insightful, Marx’s Early Writings reveal a mind on the brink of one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – the theory of Communism. This translation fully conveys the vigour of the original works. The introduction, by Lucio Colletti, considers the beliefs of the young Marx and explores these writings in the light of the later development of Marxism. The doctrine that only the whole truth about everything is completely coherent, and therefore absolutely true. See Chapter XI below.

An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Routledge Revivals) An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Routledge Revivals)

Find free online philosophy articles, podcasts, and videos with this organised collection of 400+ free philosophy resources. The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — so writes English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his monumental 1651 epic, Leviathan. To participate in the course you will need to have regular access to the Internet and you will need to buy the following texts: One of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory, Hobbes seeks to legitimize sovereign power by demonstrating that conflict among individuals is inevitable, and that peace can only be achieved if individuals give up certain freedoms to a central power (in Hobbes' case, the monarchy) in exchange for certain benefits, such as protection. Wolff, J., 2015 (revised 3rd edn) An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press (the 4th edition may also be used)Revised and updated to diversify the text throughout, in terms of the thinkers considered, the examples used, and the further reading recommended. And guess what? Plato’s ideal society is governed not through popularly democratic means but by authoritarian philosopher kings. Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945, is famous for skewering the politics of two highly-regarded philosophers who also appear on this list, Plato and Marx. From introductions and anthologies to grand political treatises from individual thinkers, this reading list is designed to provide you with a well-rounded view of the most important political contributions from philosophers down the ages. But there is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It stands in a relation of opposition to other regime types, and as a consequence the possibility of conflict, of tension, and war is built in to the very structure of politics. Regimes are necessarily partisan, that is to say they instill certain loyalties and passions in the same way that one may feel partisanship to the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, or to Yale over all rival colleges and institutions, right? Fierce loyalty, partisanship: it is inseparable from the character of regime politics. These passionate attachments are not merely something that take place, you might, say between different regimes, but even within them, as different parties and groups with loyalties and attachments contend for power, for honor, and for interest. Henry Adams once cynically reflected that politics is simply the “organization of hatreds,” and there is more than a grain of truth to this, right, although he did not say that it was also an attempt to channel and redirect those hatreds and animosities towards something like a common good. This raises the question whether it is possible to transform politics, to replace enmity and factional conflict with friendship, to replace conflict with harmony? Today it is the hope of many people, both here and abroad, that we might even overcome, might even transcend the basic structure of regime politics altogether and organize our world around global norms of justice and international law. Is such a thing possible? It can’t be ruled out, but such a world, I would note–let’s just say a world administered by international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals–would no longer be a political world. Politics only takes place within the context of the particular. It is only possible within the structure of the regime itself.

An Introduction to Political Philosophy

Republic, 1,337 (translation by F.M.Comford). ibid., 1,346. A modern illustration of this principle is the fate of Hitler after his refusal to accept the settlement reached at the Munich Conference in October, 1938, and in ultimately losing all his power by placing no limit to his ambitions. Republic, I, 352.As will be the case if, for example, B and C arc members of the more general Class A, or universal conditions of A. This raises a further set of questions that we will consider over the term. How are regimes founded, the founding of regimes? What brings them into being and sustains them over time? For thinkers like Tocqueville, for example, regimes are embedded in the deep structures of human history that have determined over long centuries the shape of our political institutions and the way we think about them. Yet other voices within the tradition–Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau come to mind–believed that regimes can be self-consciously founded through deliberate acts of great statesmen or founding fathers as we might call them. These statesmen–Machiavelli for example refers to Romulus, Moses, Cyrus, as the founders that he looks to; we might think of men like Washington, Jefferson, Adams and the like–are shapers of peoples and institutions. The very first of the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton even begins by posing this question in the starkest terms. “It has been frequently remarked,” Hamilton writes, “that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” There we see Hamilton asking the basic question about the founding of political institutions: are they created, as he puts it, by “reflection and choice,” that is to say by a deliberate act of statecraft and conscious human intelligence, or are regimes always the product of accident, circumstance, custom, and history? Chapter 3. Who Is a Statesman? What Is a Statesman? [00:22:19] Publishers description: The Second Treatise is one of the most important political treatises ever written and one of the most far-reaching in its influence. Callicles A theory which closely resembles that of Antiphon is attributed by Plato to Callicles in the dialogue Gorgias, According to Plato, Callicles held that Nature is governed by the law of force, while civil and moral laws are normally the result of contracts made by the weak to defraud the strong of what their strength would otherwise secure for them. In a state of nature the survival of thefitwould be the effective rule of life, whereas the laws of society frequently reverse this principle and compel the strong to assist the weak. Callicles thought that his theory was supported by the considerations that in both the animal kingdom and the sphere of international relations,1 in neither of which there are restrictive laws, the rule of force is the operative principle. Hence, Callicles concludes, the rule of force is natural, and should not be opposed by the laws of society. It is not clear from what Plato tells us about Callicles* theory whether (to put the point in modern terms) he was defending a naturalistic theory of morality by defining 'right' in terms of 'might', or whether he was merely arguing that, as a matter of fact, it is morally desirable that the strong should get their way. The fact that he tried to deduce what ought to happen in human society from what does happen in the animal kingdom suggests that the