An Introduction to Political Philosophy Hume's Empiricism Before the present century, when the doctrine has received wide support, the most celebrated exponent of Empiricism was the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), now generally recognized to have been one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Hume held that the only propositions which are certainly true are those which describe * relations of ideas', by which he meant analytic relationships in the sense defined above. Those which describe "matters of fact*, i.e. synthetic propositions, cannot be rationally justified, although they can be accepted as true in so far as they are justified by direct observation. But of course the great majority of synthetic propositions—in particular, the socalled 'laws' of science—go far beyond this and make assertions which cannot be justified by experience. Thus Hume argued that the belief in the universal truth of scientific laws follows repeated observations of the sequences which they describe; but he denied that there is any necessity in these sequences, or even in the occurrence of the belief that they are universal and necessary. If I infer that, because all observed samples of arsenic have proved to be poisonous, therefore all samples whatsoever are poisonous, no logical justification of this inference can, according to Hume, be given. It is just a fact that, following on the observation of numerous samples of arsenic which prove to be poisonous, everybody believes that all samples whatsoever will prove to be poisonous. But there is, according to Hume, no rational justification for this belief; it just happens to occur following on experience of the effects of arsenic in a limited number of instances, and just happens to have proved a reliable guide in practice. There is no guarantee that it will prove to be true of all instances whatsoever. Thus there is nothing * reasonable' in the belief in the a priori sense. Hume reached the same sceptical conclusions about the general propositions of morality. He thought it obvious that these propositions are synthetic, and argued that they cannot therefore be a priori Such propositions as * Jealousy is evil* or * Lying is wrong* are, he thought, obviously synthetic in that their predicates are not part of the meaning of the subjects. And such propositions cannot be a priori, for no necessary connection can, in his view, be discerned between the subject and the predicate. Hence the basis for these moral generalizations must be the same as the basis for the generalizations of natural science— the observation of a limited number of instances. And this is not a rational ground for asserting them. Having denied that moral generalizations have any logical necessity, Hume set himself to analyse the empirical evidence on which they are based. He reached the conclusion that the basis of such generalizations is a peculiar type of sentiment or feeling. When I say "Honesty is good* I am, according to Hume, saying, in a rather specific sense of the word 'like*, i Like honesty*. I am, in fact, describing not an inherent quality of honesty but a feeling excited in me by the contemplation of honesty. This feeling Hume called the 'pleasing sentiment of approbation*. He thought that moral disapproval in the same way expresses a sentiment of disapprobation. Thus Hume concluded that there is nothing "rational* or "logical* in morality and that it is impossible to show, on a priori grounds, that moral propositions are true or false. Their truth or falsity depends on the purely empirical question whether they are or are not accurate descriptions of the feelings to which they relate.

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

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 Nature and Scape of Political Philosophy 11 Some modern philosophers have raised the further question whether sentences which appear to express moral propositions are not, in part, expressions of a non-cognitive type of experience. They contend that a moral sentence is only in part the expression of a proposition, and is in part the direct expression of a feeling or a volition. This analysis has sometimes been described in picturesque terms as the 'Boo-Hurrah* Theory of Morality—meaning that moral sentences are, in part at least, not expressions of propositions at all but of feelings, just as booing and cheering are admitted to be expressions of feelings. Again, it may be argued that sentences in which the word 'ought* appears are, in part at least, the direct expression of conative attitudes or commands. Whether or not these suggestions are justified, it is important to remember that the philosopher is not directly concerned with feelings or conations but only with propositions about feelings or conations—such as the proposition asserting that moral sentences are in part a direct expression of feelings or conations, and only partly an expression of propositions about such feelings and conations. And it is not clear that the theories just referred to are doing more than drawing attention to the fact that the subject of a proposition is one thing and the proposition another, and forgetting that it is with propositions alone that the philosopher is directly concerned. If—as language certainly suggests—moral experience is a specific and distinctive kind of experience, the Naturalistic Theory of Morality must be rejected; and if the Rationalist Theory of synthetic a priori propositions is also rejected, it will be necessary to accept the Empiricist Theory of Morality. According to this theory moral propositions will be without any rational necessity, and rational arguments based upon them will therefore be of a hypothetical character. Given that 'A is good* it will be possible to deduce by a strictly rational process that 4B is good" and that *C is good" if these propositions are logically implied by *A is good';1 but the original premise *A is good" will be a belief or assumption without rational necessity. In other words, it may be possible to show that B and C must be good if A is good; but it will not be possible to show that A must be good—except, of course, in a hypothetical sense if the proposition 'A is good' is in turn implied by yet another proposition whose truth is assumed. In general, the major implication of Empiricism is that rational argument about the real world necessarily takes a hypothetical form. This is a direct consequence of the denial that synthetic propositions can be a priori, for all assertions of existence are synthetic, and therefore without a priori necessity. Moral arguments must, for the same reason, be hypothetical in character and thus incapable ofjustifying the ultimate premises upon which they are based. Political Philosophy These conclusions have important consequences for political philosophy, for the latter has usually taken the form of an attempt to justify certain assumptions about the methods and aims of government In most political philosophies this justification has been a moral justification, and has taken the form of an argument that certain forms of government, e.g. An Introduction to Political Philosophy beings must feel and will and think in accordance with certain psychological laws. Of these psychological laws Antiphon thought that the most fundamental is the desire to live and be happy and to avoid death and unhappiness. But the laws of society often interfere with the operation of this Law of Nature since they restrain people from performing acts, e.g. stealing, which might bring them happiness. Antiphon admitted that there is a sound reason for observing the laws of society if to break them would involve the shame of conviction and the pain of punishment, for these consequences are painful to the individual, and to court them is therefore to violate the fundamental Law of Nature. But whenever an individual can increase his happiness by breaking the Law of Society and avoiding detection and punishment, it is, Antiphon thought, in accordance with the Law of Nature for him to do so. The weakness of this theory is that it ignores the inevitable social relationships in which a man must live. The laws forbidding theft and murder may at times stand in the way of what a given individual would like to do; but they also prevent other people from doing to him what would undoubtedly be to his disadvantage. Indeed, the majority of civil laws are of potential advantage, as well as disadvantage, to an individual. As Hobbes subsequently recognized, a theory based upon the assumption that self-interest is the primary motive of human conduct is tenable only if it recognizes that self-interest may be quite different from the gratification of an immediate impulse, and that the achievement of personal happiness depends in no small measure upon controlling these immediate impulses and obeying civil laws made in the interest of all. Antiphon's principle might, indeed, have a useful application in a society ruled by a dictator ready to sacrifice his subjects* interests in pursuing his own, but apart from such circumstances the principle is fraught with grave dangers to the interests of both the individual and society. Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 150 (Allen and Unwin, 1948). E.g. laws forbidding cruelty to animals.

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. In more recent times various attempts have, of course, been made to introduce the 'rule of law* into international relations. After the disastrous ideological experiments of the 20th century, German-born American political philosopher Hannah Arendt diagnoses where it all went wrong.

An introduction to political philosophy : Wolff, Jonathan An introduction to political philosophy : Wolff, Jonathan

Structured around the main issues of political philosophy, Wolff introduces readers to writings from a diverse range of thinkers, helping to make a complex subject readily accessible and stimulating.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]

Nine Best Introductory Political Philosophy Books The Nine Best Introductory Political Philosophy Books

An Introduction to Political Philosophy The difference between analytic and synthetic propositions was defined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as follows: Analytic propositions, he said, 'add nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, but merely break it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly', while synthetic judgments 'add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it'.1 The difference is, in short, that the predicate in an analytic proposition is contained within the meaning of the subject, while in a synthetic proposition the predicate is not contained within the meaning of the subject but adds something related to it. Kant illustrated the difference by the two propositions 'All bodies are extended' and 'All bodies are heavy'. The former, he thought, is analytic, because the concept of 'extension' is part of the meaning of 'body', while the latter is synthetic because the concept of 'heaviness' is not part of the meaning of 'body', but only a quality which it acquires when it is placed in a gravitational field. Kant's definition drew attention to an important difference between analytic and synthetic propositions, although not all analytic propositions naturally fall into the simple subject-predicate form which his examples illustrate. The essential characteristic of an analytic proposition is that it defines the meaning, or part of the meaning, of its subject and does not describe unessential features which may, or may not, belong to it A cube of iron has a certain weight at sea level, a smaller weight at the top of a high mountain, and no weight at all at a certain point between the earth and the moon; but these differences are not essential elements in the meaning of the description 'cube of iron'. It is clear, on the other hand, that if the cube of iron had no extension it would not be a cube of iron, since extension is an essential part of the meaning of the phrase 'cube of iron'. In other words, to deny an analytic proposition is self-contradictory since that is simultaneously asserting and denying the same thing. It is, to borrow Bertrand Russell's example, like saying 'A bald man is not bald'.1 Modern philosophers have devoted much attention to the study of analytic propositions, and many would agree with Professor Ayer that 'a proposition is analytic when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains',2 and that this is so because analytic propositions 'do not make any assertion about the empirical world They simply record our determination to use words in a certain fashion.'3 They are, in other words, tautologies; and the reason why we think it worth while to assert them and sometimes, as in mathematics, to draw elaborate deductions from them, is that our reason is too limited to recognize their full significance without going through these complex verbal processes. These considerations may appear to be extremely abstract and their connection with what is commonly understood as 'political philosophy' far from obvious; but in fact this connection is both simple and fundamental. For philosophy is the 'quest for certainty', and if certainty is a characteristic of propositions, then an inquiry into the nature and scope of Each chapter, when accessed digitally, includes tutorial-style videos from the author to help students understand the key questions and controversies in political philosophy and encourage them to form their own opinion. An Introduction to Political Philosophy First published in 1953, this seminal introduction to political philosophy is intended for both the student of political theory and for the general reader. After an introduction which explains the nature and purpose of philosophy, Dr Murray provides a critical examination of the principle theories advanced by political philosophers from Plato to Marx, paying special attention to contemporary issues. The book also makes an attempt to define the essential issues of philosophical significance in contemporary politics, with special reference to the conflict between political authority and individual rights, and to show how the different moral assumptions underlying authoritarian and democratic systems of government are ultimately based upon different theories of logic.An Introduction to Political Philosophy On the other hand, so long as the issue between Rationalism and Empiricism is left open, there is no reason why Rationalism should not be combined with a Naturalistic Theory of Morality. For then, even if moral conceptions can be defined in terms of non-moral conceptions, they may be necessarily related to the subject of the propositions in which they occur if it is possible for a proposition to be at once synthetic and a priori It is, indeed, quite consistent to combine either a Moral or a Naturalistic Theory of Morality with either a Rationalist or Empiricist Theory since the latter represent the alternative views which may be held about the logical status of moral propositions, while the former represent alternative views which may be held about the meaning of moral concepts. On the other hand, if Empiricists are right in holding that the basic premise of Rationalism—that synthetic propositions may be a priori—is self-contradictory., the rationalist form of both Moral and Naturalistic Theories is automatically ruled out, and the issue narrowed to a choice between the empiricist forms of the Moral and Naturalistic Theories. Political theories may therefore be broadly classified as follows: Rationalist Moral The Nature and Scope of Political Philosophy 13 Classification of Political Theories Political philosophies may, therefore, be provisionally divided into Moral and Naturalistic Theories of the State. Moral Theories are those which claim to justify government on moral grounds, while Naturalistic Theories are those which claim to justify it on scientific grounds. The justification provided by Moral Theories claims to be categorical and unconditional, whereas that provided by Naturalistic Theories is necessarily hypothetical, since it is necessarily conditional upon the desire for a certain end. In Moral Theories the ends of government are defined as the ends which ought to be pursued. In Naturalistic Theories these ends are defined as the ends which are desired Moral Theories tell us what we ought to do, while Naturalistic Theories tell us what we must do if we wish to achieve certain ends. But if different people desire different ends there is no way by which a Naturalistic Theory can determine which end ought to be preferred, since such discrimination would involve a moral judgment Moral Theories have fallen under two main heads according as the good of the state or the good of the individual has been regarded as primary. On the one hand it has been held that the good of the state defines the standard to which the individual ought to conform, and, on the other hand, it has been held that the good of the individual defines the purpose which the state ought to serve. Thefirsttype of theory has been variously known as the Organic or Collectivist Theory and the second as the Machine or Individualist Theory, and the division corresponds roughly to the popular distinction between 'totalitarian' and 'democratic' theories of government. When the Individualist Theory defines the moral ideal as pleasure it is commonly known as Utilitarianism, since the methods and aims of government are then judged to be good in so far as they are useful in promoting people's pleasure, or, as it is often said, 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number*. But although political theories can be readily divided into Moral and Naturalistic Theories, there is another, and equally fundamental, division. Whether or not moral concepts are, as the Moral Theory asserts, specific and indefinable in terms of non-moral concepts, there remains the question whether the propositions in which these terms appear are a priori or empirical.1 If, for the reasons set forth above,2 it is agreed that moral propositions are in any case synthetic, it will follow that they must be empirical unless, as Rationalism asserts, synthetic propositions can be a priori. Thus, whether or not moral terms can be defined in naturalistic terms, moral propositions must be empirical unless the fundamental premise of Rationalism is true. The historical examples of the Moral Theory have in nearly every case been based on the premises of Rationalism, for almost all have assumed that the propositions of morality are a priori and possess a categorical necessity. Hume's moral theory is a notable exception to this generalization, for he maintained both that moral experience is a specific and irreducible type of experience and that moral propositions are none the less wholly empirical. But most historical examples of Empiricist Theories have also been Naturalistic Theories, like the theories of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Bentham. 1 Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a brilliant discussion of some of the most contentious issues in contemporary political theory that anyone interested in political philosophy would benefit from reading. Further reading 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 Exploring the institutions, operations, and techniques of totalitarian movements, Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism focuses on two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our recent history — Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia — which she shrewdly establishes as two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left.