Hegel and The Libertarians

1998 ◽  
pp. 165-172
Author(s):  
Paulo Roberto Monteiro De Araujo
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy

This paper aims to show how the Hegelian philosophy can contribute to the conceptual discussions between the two strains of contemporary ethical-political philosophy. I argue that the Hegelian political theory is of central import to the discussion between communitarians and libertarians, both in the communitarian criticism of the libertarian — mainly in Michael Sandel's criticism of Rawls — and in the Rawlsian project of a society founded in justice as equality. For if the communitarians' theoretical basis is the living of a community in terms of historical-social values, and the individualists' deontological rationality is the basis for the libertarians, Hegel's pointing to a synthetic resolution of the two positions provides a moral foundation for their harmonious coexistence. This does not, however, mean that there is one simple ideological solution that can unite the universal and the particular, the community and the individual, through artificial dialectics, as the critics of Hegelian thought would affirm following the Frankfurt School.

The Muslim Tradition of Political Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahrough Akhavi
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Epistemological Foundation ◽  
The Individual

The doctrine of salvation in Islam centers on the community of believers. Contemporary Muslim political philosophy (or, preferably, political theory) covers a broad expanse that brings under its rubric at least two diverse tendencies: an approach that stresses the integration of religion and politics, and an approach that insists on their separation. Advocates of the first approach seem united in their desire for the “Islamization of knowledge,” meaning that the epistemological foundation of understanding and explanation in all areas of life, including all areas of political life, must be “Islamic.” Thus, one needs to speak of an “Islamic anthropology,” an “Islamic sociology,” an “Islamic political science,” and so on. But there is also a distinction that one may make among advocates of this first approach. Moreover, one can say about many, perhaps most, advocates of the first approach that they feel an urgency to apply Islamic law throughout all arenas of society. This article focuses on the Muslim tradition of political philosophy and considers the following themes: the individual and society, the state, and democracy.

MALCOLM’SLEVIATHAN: HOBBES’S “THING”

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
JEFFREY COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
General Editor ◽  
Fourth Decade ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
The University

The publication of the Clarendon edition of theWorks of Thomas Hobbesrecently entered its fourth decade. The monumental project has unfolded against shifting methodologies in the practice of intellectual history, and the edition's own history exemplifies these shifts. Its first general editor was Howard Warrender, who died in 1985 after a distinguished career as a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield. Warrender was best known for thePolitical Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. This influential book offered a deontological interpretation of Hobbes's theory of obligation, according to which the Hobbesian natural laws were to be understood as divine commands. Warrender's book appeared in 1957 and was resolutely textualist in its approach, exploring Hobbes's arguments in isolation and with considerable interpretive charity. His subject was the “theoretical basis” of Hobbes's writing, the importance of which might not be “historically conspicuous.”

Positive Freedom

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Physical Control ◽  
Positive Freedom ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Political Value

Freedom is widely regarded as a basic social and political value that is deeply connected to the ideals of democracy, equality, liberation, and social recognition. Many insist that freedom must include conditions that go beyond simple “negative” liberty understood as the absence of constraints; only if freedom includes other conditions such as the capability to act, mental and physical control of oneself, and social recognition by others will it deserve its place in the pantheon of basic social values. Positive Freedom is the first volume to examine the idea of positive liberty in detail and from multiple perspectives. With contributions from leading scholars in ethics and political theory, this collection includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.

Hegel's Occasional Writings: State and Individual

1983 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-208
Author(s):  
Peter J. Steinberger
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Behavior ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Individual Values ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Basic Task ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Perhaps the most basic and enduring theme in political philosophy is that which concerns the inherent tension between individual values and social values. Indeed, the task of reconciling, in thought, the individual and social is virtually a definition of political philosophy. Of course, in much secondary work, and some primary work as well, this basic task often gets lost in a maze of more particular considerations, including the analysis of moral principles and the elaboration of special institutional arrangements or particular causal patterns. Nonetheless, major theorists, virtually without exception, have recognized that the basic individual values (e.g., freedom, privacy, personal morality) may well be politically undesirable and, similarly, that the requirements of political life (e.g., order, obedience, ethical behavior) may significantly compromise individual goals.

Grotius na Interdisciplinaridade Moderna Entre o Direito e a Filosofia Política

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (33) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
André Santos Campos ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual

Modern political philosophy, especially since Machiavelli, intends to uncover what politics actually is, and in order to achieve this it often needs to penetrate into disciplines not immediately related to politics and assimilate for itself additional concepts and methodologies. Thus, it appears to be interdisciplinary in the manipulation of specific conceptual instruments. Since there is a methodological shift in modernity imposing the individual person as a basic starting-point of political philosophy, which is expressed in a language of rights, the birth of this juridical-political interdisciplinarity is to be found in a table of concepts established in the science of law and applicable to political philosophy. In order to further understand this, the origins of Grotius’s definitions of ius must be sought out, since they set the background for the bridge he architected between law and political philosophy to be crossed by subsequent modern political philosophers. The solidity of this theoretical basis for interdisciplinary political philosophy depends upon the simultaneity of all of Grotius’s different meanings of ius: it is from this foundation that seventeenth-century political philosophy can begin from.

Political philosophy, Indian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohail Inayatullah
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Priestly Class ◽  
The Relationship

While Western political theory has been framed as the struggle between the state and the individual, Indian political philosophy has been more concerned with issues of self-liberation, morality and leadership. Until recently, with the advent of institutionalized or syndicated Hinduism, Indian society made a softer distinction between state and religion. Classical Indian political theory, as with Kauṭilya, centred on axioms on how to maintain and expand power. Kauṭilya argued that reason, the edicts of the king, and his own rules of governance, the Arthaśāstra, were as important for decision-making as the ancient religious treatises, which defined social structure and one’s duty to family, caste and God. With the exception of the Arthaśāstra, politics was expressed through the ability not so much to govern as to define social and moral responsibility, what one could or could not do and who could oversee these rules. Like all civilizations, India had periods of rule by accumulators of capital and traders, warriors and kings, and Brahmans and monks; there were also revolts by peasants. Still, philosophy was in the hands of the Brahmans, the priestly class. This philosophy was primarily not about artha (economic gain) or kāma (pleasure), but about dharma (virtue) and mokṣa (liberation from the material world). The attainment of salvation, of release from the bonds of karma, was far more important than the relationship between the individual and the sovereign, as was the case in Western political philosophy.

From Crusades to Colonization: Violence in Secular and Religious Political Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Xavier Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
State Power ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Beliefs And Values

This paper examines the transition in political philosophy between the medieval and early-modern periods by focusing on the emergence of sovereignty doctrine. Scholars such as Charles Taylor and John Rawls have focused on the ability of modern-states to overcome conflicts between different religious confessionals. In contrast, this paper seeks to examine some of the peace-promoting features of Latin-Christendom and some of the conflict-promoting features of modern-secular states. The Christian universalism of the medieval period is contrasted with the colonial ventures promoted by the Peace of Westphalia. This paper’s goal is not to argue that secularism is in fact more violent than religion. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate the major role that religion played in early modern philosophy and the development of sovereignty doctrine. It argues against the view that the modern, secular state is capable of neutrality vis-à-vis religion, and also combats the view that the secular nature of modern international law means that it is neutral to the different beliefs and values of the world’s peoples. These observations emphasize the ways in which state power and legitimacy are at the heart of the secular turn in political philosophy. 

Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Mara
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Democracies

This book examines how ideas of war and peace have functioned as organizing frames of reference within the history of political theory. It interprets ten widely read figures in that history within five thematically focused chapters that pair (in order) Schmitt and Derrida, Aquinas and Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, and Thucydides and Plato. The book’s substantive argument is that attempts to establish either war or peace as dominant intellectual perspectives obscure too much of political life. The book argues for a style of political theory committed more to questioning than to closure. It challenges two powerful currents in contemporary political philosophy: the verdict that premodern or metaphysical texts cannot speak to modern and postmodern societies, and the insistence that all forms of political theory be some form of democratic theory. What is offered instead is a nontraditional defense of the tradition and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory. Though the book avoids any attempt to show the immediate relevance of these interpretations to current politics, its impetus stems very much from the current political circumstances. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century , a series of wars has eroded confidence in the progressively peaceful character of international relations; citizens of the Western democracies are being warned repeatedly about the threats posed within a dangerous world. In this turbulent context, democratic citizens must think more critically about the actions their governments undertake. The texts interpreted here are valuable resources for such critical thinking.

The Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-229
Author(s):  
Dominic Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Individual Justice ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Republic. The Republic is among Plato’s most complex works. From its title, the first-time reader will expect a dialogue about political theory, yet the work starts from the perspective of the individual, coming to focus on the question of how, if at all, justice contributes to an agent’s happiness. Only after this question has been fully set out does the work evolve into an investigation of politics—of the ideal state and of the institutions that sustain it, especially those having to do with education. But the interest in individual justice and happiness is never left behind. Rather, the work weaves in and out of the two perspectives, individual and political, right through to its conclusion. All this may leave one wondering about the unity of the work. The chapter shows that, despite the enormous range of topics discussed, the Republic fits together as a coherent whole.

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