Political Philosophy

Political philosophy asks what justifies political power and how a society's benefits and burdens should be divided. The beginner tier builds the working vocabulary of authority, the state, liberty, equality, justice, rights, and law from nothing. The intermediate tier works through the social contract tradition, Rawls and his critics, the main ideological positions, capabilities, republican freedom, democracy, punishment, and dissent. The advanced tier takes up the contemporary literature: public reason and perfectionism, the boundary problem, jurisprudence, philosophical anarchism, global justice, exploitation, structural injustice, collective agency, and the limits of markets.

Beginner

No prior exposure assumed. Every term is defined where it first appears.

Authority and Legitimacy
Why some commands create obligations and others are only threats backed by force
7 min
What a State Is For
Order, defence, and public goods, and the anarchist reply that none of it requires a state
8 min
Needs firstAuthority and Legitimacy
Liberty, Equality, and Justice as Three Demands
How freedom from interference, equal standing, and fair shares pull against each other
9 min
Needs firstWhat a State Is For
What Justice Requires
Desert, need, and merit as rival bases for a share, and the difference between a fair procedure and a fair outcome
10 min
Needs firstLiberty, Equality, and Justice as Three Demands
Rights, Introduced
Claims against others, liberties to act, and the split between rights demanding restraint and rights demanding provision
9 min
Needs firstWhat Justice Requires
Law and the Rule of Law
What separates a legal system from organised force, and the first split between positivists and natural lawyers
10 min
Needs firstRights, Introduced

Intermediate

Undergraduate level. Formal machinery, standard results, and the objections that stuck.

The Social Contract TraditionPlanned
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau derive the state from an agreement made out of a stateless condition, and disagree about what that condition is like
16 min
Rawls: The Original Position and the Two PrinciplesPlanned
Choosing principles behind a screen that hides your talents, class, and conception of the good
18 min
Nozick and Entitlement TheoryPlanned
The argument that justice depends on how holdings arose, so any fixed pattern can be kept only by blocking voluntary transfers
14 min
The Capabilities ApproachPlanned
Sen and Nussbaum measure advantage by what people are able to do and be rather than by resources or satisfaction
20 min
Libertarianism, Liberalism, Socialism, ConservatismPlanned
What separates the four once you sort them by their commitments on property, equality, and inherited practice
15 min
Marx on Alienation, Class, and IdeologyPlanned
Labour that confronts the worker as alien, class defined by relation to productive resources, and beliefs that serve an existing order
16 min
Democracy and Its JustificationsPlanned
Whether majority rule is defended by the quality of its outcomes or by the equal standing it expresses
14 min
Republicanism and Non-DominationPlanned
Freedom as the absence of arbitrary power rather than the absence of actual interference
20 min
Punishment and the Right to PunishPlanned
Backward-looking desert against forward-looking deterrence, and the separate question of who may inflict either
17 min
Civil DisobediencePlanned
Public lawbreaking that accepts the penalty, and the conditions offered for when it is justified
12 min
TolerationPlanned
The puzzle of putting up with what you judge to be wrong, and where a neutral state draws the line
13 min

Advanced

Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open.

Luck Egalitarianism and Relational EqualityPlanned
Whether equality corrects for disadvantage nobody chose or instead removes standing hierarchies between citizens
20 min
Public Reason and LegitimacyPlanned
The demand that coercive law be justifiable in terms citizens holding different doctrines could accept
22 min
Political Liberalism Against PerfectionismPlanned
Whether a state may promote a conception of the good life, and what neutrality could mean if it may not
22 min
Deliberative, Epistemic, and Agonistic DemocracyPlanned
Three rival pictures of what democracy is for: reasoned exchange, tracking correct answers, and conflict that is never settled
22 min
The Boundary ProblemPlanned
Democracy decides questions by a vote of the people, and cannot decide by a vote who the people are
22 min
Jurisprudence: Hart, Dworkin, and Hard CasesPlanned
The rule of recognition against law as an interpretive practice, and what each says a judge does when the rules run out
26 min
Philosophical AnarchismPlanned
The claim that no state is legitimate in the sense required for a general duty to obey, and that this changes less than it sounds
22 min
Global Justice and CosmopolitanismPlanned
Whether duties of distributive justice stop at the border or reach everyone, and what shared institutions have to do with it
22 min
Immigration and Open BordersPlanned
Arguments from freedom of movement set against a political community's claimed right to select who enters
20 min
Theories of ExploitationPlanned
Rival accounts built on surplus extraction, unfair terms of exchange, and taking advantage of vulnerability
22 min
Ideal and Non-Ideal TheoryPlanned
What is gained and lost by theorising justice on the assumption that everyone complies and conditions are favourable
20 min
Critical Race Theory and Feminist Political PhilosophyPlanned
Structural accounts of injustice, the racial contract as a rereading of contract theory, and the challenge to the public and private divide
24 min
Social Ontology and Collective AgencyPlanned
When a group counts as an agent in its own right, and the aggregation paradox that makes group judgment more than a sum of votes
24 min
Property, Taxation, and RedistributionPlanned
Whether pre-tax holdings are a baseline that taxation departs from, and what each answer implies about redistributive claims
22 min
Markets and Their LimitsPlanned
Which goods should not be for sale, and whether the objection is to the terms of exchange or to what selling them expresses
22 min