An Introduction to Political Philosophy

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How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? We find ourselves easily intimidated by a list of famous names and end up not thinking for ourselves. While Wollstonecraft and others sowed the seeds for the ‘first wave’ of feminist philosophy and activism, French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex marks the starting point of second-wave feminism, whereby the aim is to achieve gender equality beyond voting rights. Where the good citizen is relative to the regime, you might say regime-specific, the good human being, so he believes, is good everywhere. Many courses can be studied for credit which means they can count towards a recognised qualification.

An Introduction to Political Philosophy

He obtained his PhD in 2013 and became an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) in 2023.After the disastrous ideological experiments of the 20th century, German-born American political philosopher Hannah Arendt diagnoses where it all went wrong. We will explore the roots of modern democracy; the arguments for and against capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, anarchism, and communism; issues of economic justice and the proper function of government; warfare and ethics; and such recent movements as feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, and environmentalism. Bentham, Jeremy ( 2002), Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, eds. Providing a comprehensive introduction to political philosophy, this 2006 book combines discussion of historical and contemporary figures, together with numerous real-life examples. 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.

Conceptualizing Politics | An Introduction to Political Conceptualizing Politics | An Introduction to Political

This does notcount towards your final outcome but preparing for it, and the feedback you are given, will help you prepare for your assessed piece of work of 1,500 words due at the end of the course. Rather, the great works provide us, so to speak, with a repository of fundamental or permanent questions that political scientists still continue to rely on in their work. Will the best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made a supreme sacrifice towards self-perfection? Ten years of his academic career were spent at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main and later at Harvard (Law School and laterCenter for European Studies).Turning from introductions and anthologies to primary texts, where better to start than with a discussion of political philosophy that, though over two thousand years old, is one of the subject’s finest works and still drives discussion today? Through five main critiques, this article further shows the value of Holbach’s positive theory on key concepts such as the state of nature, sociability, property, the general will and equality.

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

In contrast to Rawls, Nozick advocates for an extremely minimal state, arguing anything beyond the “narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts” violates individual human rights. Preface vii I am deeply conscious of the way in which their criticisms have helped me to work out my own position. The wager on which Conceptualizing Politics rests is that by focusing on the concepts fundamental to politics one can break through the complexity ordinarily associated with that subject. Those are some of the most basic and fundamental problems of the study of politics, but you might say, where does one enter this debate?Help students understand the main problems in political philosophy including the authority of the state, the justification of democracy, the place of liberty, the distribution of property, and feminist theory. The book, rich of inspiration as it is, should not be considered one of the several textbooks on political philosophy and should be rather considered as a text which can be read at different layers by students, scholars and practitioners. You can’t understand a regime unless you understand, so to speak, what it stands for, what a people stand for, what they look up to as well as its, again, its structure of institutions and rights and privileges.

Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Online) | Oxford

It shows that liberalism’s fixation on the sovereign nation-state as the only legitimate model of governance necessarily invites nationalism as a means to reproduce such a model.There are other authors such as Kymlicka (2002) who assert that the modernist categories of political philosophy are proving themselves to be increasingly inadequate for theorizing contemporary political landscapes (p.