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Political philosophy is the branch of philosophy devoted to reflecting on the contents, values, and conditions of political life. Specific methods of political philosophy are distinguishable from other disciplines, such as political science and history, with various forms and varieties emerging in contemporary political philosophy.

The Objects Of Political Philosophy

It is a common practice to define a discipline either on the basis of its specific objects or on the basis of its methods. By looking at its objects, political philosophy can be defined as the specific branch of philosophy devoted to the study of politics. The main questions that political philosophers then raise concer n (1) legitimacy, (2) modes, and (3) limits of political power.

With regard to the first, the legitimacy of political power, the most fundamental questions that political philosophers raise surround the very existence of politics: Why should there be a political power in the first place? Why do people live under governments? Would it be preferable to live in a condition of anarchy? These are questions that touch on crucial philosophical problems and that have been raised at least since individual human beings realized that the political arrangements they live in are not eternal and unchangeable; rather, they are temporary and subject to the possibility of change. In antiquity, the typical answer showed that political power derived from the place of human beings in the chain of beings, whereas modern philosophers typically looked for a justification of power in the will of human beings. The typical example of the first approach is Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who in Politics famously defined the human being as a political animal, while Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679 CE) exemplifies the second approach. By grounding the existence of political power in a social contract that individuals stipulate in order to exist apart from the natural condition of war and anarchy, in Leviathan Hobbes justifies the existence of power in the will of individuals.

The second question concerns the modes of exercising political power. What fundamental values should uphold one’s political life? What political arrangements best promote them? These are also crucial questions that political philosophy has been raising since its inception. An example of the typical answer in antiquity to the question is Plato’s depiction of the perfect republic. Plato (427–347 BCE) argues in The Republic that justice is the most important value in human life and that it should be the ordering principle of political arrangements. Drawing on an analogy between the equilibrate soul ruled by reason and the just republic ruled by philosophers, Plato depicts an ideal political community by assigning a specific position to every social group and describing in detail each one’s task. An example of the typically modern answer to this question is Niccolò Machiavelli’s theory of the separation of politics from morals in The Prince. If the antiquity sees them in continuity, Machiavelli (1469–1527) argues that politics should be autonomous from morals and should promote its own values. In Machiavelli’s view, the best political arrangement to promote the liberty of individual human beings is the republican one.

Finally, there is the question of the limits to political power. Are there limits to what political power can legitimately do? If these limits exist, what are the criteria for defining them? The question has also been raised since the inception of political philosophy, but it gained prominence in the modern epoch. If political power is not derived from the position of human beings in the chain of beings, but is instead the consequence of their will, it follows that this very will is also entitled to set the legitimate limits to politics. Liberal philosophers have paid particular attention to this question. Among them, John Locke (1632–1704) argued in Two Treatises of Government that together with the limits posed by nature itself, every legitimate government is also meant to respect the fundamental rights of individuals, such as their life and their private properties.

The Methods Of Political Philosophy

At this point, questions may still arise regarding the difference between political philosophy and other disciplines also devoted to the study of politics. As the question itself suggests, it is not sufficient just to look at the objects of political philosophy. It is only by considering its specific methods that a full-fledged definition of political philosophy emerges, setting it apart from other disciplines.

If political philosophy is a form of philosophical reflection on politics, then it follows that its methods can be as many as those that philosophy can actually provide. In the first place, the difference emerges between those political philosophies that are derived from entire philosophical systems and those that focus on a specific issue. An example of the first kind of political philosophy is Plato’s already mentioned conception of the ideal polity, which derives from his more general philosophical views, while Machiavelli is an example of the second. Indeed, while Plato contributes to many fields of philosophical investigation (from ethics to metaphysics and theory of knowledge), Machiavelli’s contributions to philosophy, aside from his political writings, are negligible. Furthermore, if in the first case, the difference between political philosophy and political science clearly emerges, the former the result of an entire system of thought and the second a discipline mainly focused on specific issues. In the second, there is a significant convergence. In exploring whether Machiavelli’s The Prince is a work in political philosophy or in political science, in the context of works written before the emergence of a separate discipline of political science, a significant overlap between the two emerges.

The next task then involves identifying the difference between political philosophy and political science, methodologically speaking. If by Machiavelli’s time, the two disciplines were still to a large extent intertwined, the difference emerges more clearly with contemporary examples. In the last century, political science has acquired a methodological status well distinguished from that of political philosophy. To a certain extent, its specific method is defined in opposition to that of political philosophy.

In the first place, as it is usually put, political philosophy is a normative enterprise, which reflects on how best to arrange one’s political life. In contrast, political science aims to be value free, to simply describe and explain facts. The distinction goes back to the positivist distinction between three kinds of propositions: synthetic, analytic, and evaluative. The first are the propositions that describe facts (e.g., “there are 156 towns in this country”), the second are those that analyze the content of other propositions and therefore contain no advancement of knowledge (e.g., «the GDP is the gross domestic product of a country”), and the third are propositions that contain judgments of value (e.g., “justice is the most important political value”). The idea is that since philosophical propositions cannot be subsumed under the first two kinds of propositions, they must be evaluative. Many, such as Hilary Putnam, have questioned the distinction, in particular with observations that factual descriptions also contain more or less hidden judgments of values. For instance, going back to the earlier example, it could be sustained that the very definition of towns instead of mere villages contains a judgment of value.

Yet, the distinction still obtains between a discipline that primarily aims at describing the facts of one’s political life (political science) and another, political philosophy, which directly aims at defining how to best arrange it. This does not mean that political philosophy is only normative; this is only one kind of political philosophy, and even in this case there are rarely only pure judgments of values. This means that the two disciplines have a different methodological attitude toward political life. Political science aims to tell how the world is, political philosophy aims to assess how it should be.

This also leads to another difference between political philosophy and political science. Whereas political philosophy could also do without a reference to experience, works in the field of political science are based on a systematic reference to the world how it actually is. Indeed, it is a striking characteristic of purely normative political philosophers that they often neglect actual politics in their works. Whereas political philosophers are offered this option—with another question about whether this is a good or bad political philosophy—this is unthinkable in the case of a political scientist. Both qualitative and quantitative methods in political science are based on a systematic and nonoccasional reference to the empirical world.

The normative character of political philosophy and its nonsystematic reference to the actual world also sets it apart from history. Although it is disputable whether a completely value-free historical research has ever taken place, it is a fact that the aim of a historian is primarily to tell how things have been, and not how they should be. Thus, although it is possible to have works in political philosophy that project in the metaphysical or utopian no places—first coined by Thomas More 1516 in his classical Utopia—this is unthinkable in the case of history. The historian looks at the past, although this research can be more or less subtly guided by a certain view of the present and of the future.

Modern Varieties Of Political Philosophy

One of the most common distinctions proposed for grouping available political philosophies is that between analytical and continental political philosophy. Not only is the distinction geographical (the philosophy done in the Old Continent opposed to the approach prevailing in the United States), but it also aims to distinguish the sort of enlightened, science oriented political philosophy done in the aftermath of authors such as David Hume, Gottlob Frege, and Jeremy Bentham from those who follow the philosophical style of authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Many sides have questioned the distinction. In the first place, the term continental is misleading in as far as emblematic analytical philosophers such as Frege lived in the Old Continent. The term analytical is equally misleading because the works of alleged continental philosophers such as Rousseau and Hegel are also analytical if analytical simply means an enterprise devoted to the analysis of concepts. Thus, the distinction seems to be more a means to criticize philosophical adversaries than a conceptual distinction. The label of “continental” philosophy has often been used to accuse adversaries of lack of method and rigor, whereas the label “analytical” refers to accusation of offering sophisticated argument, but lacking any grip on reality. According to some, David West, for example, beyond such a distinction there is the ideological opposition between a “West” perceived as free, prosperous, celebrating human rights and the American way, and an “East” that has been totalitarian, stagnant, and oppressive.

A more fruitful distinction is that between the different methods of contemporary political philosophy, among which one can distinguish at least four: (1) the normative prescription of standards of conduct, (2) the construction of theoretical frameworks for the use of political concepts, (3) the deconstructive unpacking of concepts and paradigms, and (4) the history of political concepts. All are philosophical methods in that they aim to clarify concepts, be it through disclosing their normative potential, reconstructing the more general framework for their use, deconstructing overall, or reconstructing their history.

Normative political philosophy, after a long period of stagnation, was revived by the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971. Rawls’s attempt to set the normative standards of a just society through the conceptual tool of a hypothetical social contract gave rise to a huge debate that did not cease to attract the attention of political philosophers. The only work comparable in influence is Jürgen Habermas’s 1992 Between Facts and Norms. Habermas’s attempt to ground democracy in the ideal conditions of speech and deliberation has attracted increasing attention on both sides of the Atlantic so that some authors speak of a deliberative turn in political philosophy.

However, the so-called normative political philosophy does not exhaust the entire contemporary scenario. If it is true that political philosophy always contains a normative part, there are still political philosophers who do not see their primary task in setting the standards for conduct. Chiara Bottici’s Philosophy of Political Myth (2007) offers an example of political philosophy understood as construction of philosophical framework for the use of political concepts (i.e., the second type). Whereas both Rawls and Habermas see human beings as primarily rational actors, Bottici argues that human beings do not only act on the basis of rational considerations, and therefore a philosophical framework needs to be constructed to adequately account for this fact. Hence Bottici’s proposal of a philosophy of political myth explains both what political myths are, and why human beings should or should not make recourse to them. Together with the analysis of the conditions for public reason, political philosophy has therefore also been analyzing those for public imagination.

Yet, according to some authors, the primary task of political philosophy is not the construction of theoretical frameworks but rather their deconstruction (i.e., the fourth kind of political philosophy). The concept of deconstruction is primarily linked to the work of Jacques Derrida, and the main example of a political philosophy based on deconstruction is his Politics of Friendship (1997). In this work, Derrida deconstructs the concept of friendship by showing that brotherhood and fraternity have consistently served as the paradigm of friendship and political relations throughout the history of Western philosophy; the result is a systematic exclusion of women from all of them.

Finally, whereas Bottici distinguishes between the methods of history and those of political philosophy, according to some authors, political philosophy should be an enterprise essentially based on history of concepts. The main idea here is that political philosophy cannot be a free-floating intellectual enterprise, but must always reflect the contingency of the specific historical context in which it takes place. There are two main versions of this approach. The stronger one says that because it is impossible to transcend one’s own historical context, political philosophy should be nothing more than conceptual history. The weaker form says instead that because there is no real progress in the discipline, but instead the perpetual recurrence of the same problems, rethinking the classical authors is a fruitful starting point for rethinking about more contemporary issues.

The four types of political philosophy are ideal types. Although it is possible to point to exemplary works for each of them, most of the time, works in political philosophy contain more than one single method. For example, Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms contains both a political philosophy of the first and of the fourth kind, and Plato’s Republic contains elements of the first and the second.

An epoch of rapid change often call the boundaries of the disciplines into question. Among the works that are on the forefront of questioning boundaries, at least three kinds of political philosophy stand out: (1) the poststatist, (2) the feminists, and (3) the green political philosophy. Although these kinds of political philosophy also make recourse to one or more of the methods described earlier, they stand out in the contemporary panorama of political philosophy for their innovative and boundary-questioning potential. The poststatist political philosophy questions the centrality of the sovereign state in modern political philosophy, envisaging forms of justice and democracy beyond traditional state boundaries, as explained by David Held. Feminist political philosophy questions instead the traditional boundary between the public and the private sphere, arguing that such a distinction is a means to perpetrate the domination of men and segregation of women, especially as presented by Carol Pateman. Finally, green political philosophy challenges traditional ways of conceiving the boundaries between human beings and their natural environment, arguing that the latter can no longer be conceived as the mere passive theatre of human beings’ political action. In the face of events such as climate changes, particularly as put forth by Val Plumwood, new political philosophies are necessary to assure not only justice among human beings but also their very survival.

Bibliography:

Bottici, Chiara. Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. London:Verso, 1997.
Goodin, Robert E., Philio Pettit, and Thomas Pogge. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
Held, David. Global Covenant:The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. Political Philosophy:Theories, Thinkers, Concepts. Washington, D.C: CQ Press, 2001.
Miller, David. Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Plumwood,Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
West, David. “Continental Philosophy.” In A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Vol. 1, edited by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.

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