Political Western political philosophy in from the start of the 20th century

Nineteenth-century European civilization had been the first to dominate and pervade the whole world and to create a new self-sustaining productivity in which all eventually might share. But, as Saint-Simon had pointed out, this civilization had a fatal flaw. The rule of law, accepted within the politically advanced states, had never been achieved among them. Heavily armed nations and empires remained in a Hobbesian “posture of war,” and classical Classical and medieval ideals of world order had long been discarded. Within states, also, laissez-faire capitalism had exacerbated class conflicts, while the decline of religious belief had undermined traditional solidarity. And in 1914, when a general European war broke out, the peoples, contrary to the hopes of cosmopolitan revolutionaries, rallied behind their national governments. When the victorious powers failed to promote world order through the League of Nations, a second global conflict followed, , even more horrific than the first, ensued, during which were developed weapons so destructive as to threaten life everywhere.

In the aftermath of these catastrophes and the worldwide revulsion they occasioned, not least against the European colonial powers, three various mainstreams of mid- 20th-century political philosophy may be discerned.

In liberal-constitutional states, with modified, managerial capitalism and various degrees of public welfare, a political pragmatism has emerged, still maintaining the Aristotelian distinction between the rule of law and government by consent, on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. Second, there has been a reaffirmation of religious or quasi-religious values appealing to conscience and the inner man, expressed persuasively in Existentialist writings. Third, revolutionary ideas have also developed, most of them along Marxist lines. Other revolutionary doctrines appeal to anarchist traditions and are elaborated with neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian insights. Within these categories many shades of opinion are expressed, and only a sampling of representative views is presented here.

Political pragmatism

The first, pragmatist approach probably has been most powerfully asserted in the United States and Great Britain. The American writer Lewis Mumford, for example, has advocated a militant humanism, defending people against the alienations of megalopolitan life and attacking mechanization and materialism. Like the Greek philosophers and like Tocqueville, whom he admires, Mumford declares, “In the end, all our contrivances have but one object; the continued growth of human personalities and the cultivation of the best life possible.” The American philosopher and educationist John Dewey, on the other hand, sought to counteract the dehumanization of industrial mass society by a freer form of education, liberating the personality.

Both these writers criticize the existing structure of society and its modified capitalism, but try to work within it. Another humanist, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, was more radical. Russell carried into political philosophy an aristocratic individualism, campaigning for toleration, sexual freedom, compassion, and common sense. He broadcast elite values to a mass society and attacked materialism, crass bureaucracy, and war. He twice went to prison in pacifist protest and was obsessed with the universal menace of nuclear weapons. He denounced warlike political theories: “Remember your humanity,” he said, “and forget the rest.” On political tactics often inept, Russell won wide influence as a man of principle, concerned to adapt archaic institutions to the changed environment of mankind.

The Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl Popper has demonstrated the pretensions of the 19th-century determinist philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, while an English historian and philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, has ridiculed the idea of a supposedly objective march of history. Berlin also rejects the Marxist belief that all values are conditioned by the place men occupy on the “moving stair of time.” Marx, he points out, was as romantic as Hegel in envisaging a “world which moves from explosion to explosion in order to fulfil the great cosmic design.” Moral values, he insists, are not just a “subjective gloss unworthy of consideration on the great hard edifice of historical construction.” No single formula can be found, Berlin argues, whereby the various objectives of men can be harmoniously realized. There are many human goals, which may well be in conflict with one another.

This empirical, pluralist, and liberal political philosophy has much in common with the approach of the Frenchman Émile Durkheim and the Englishman Graham Wallas, both founding fathers of modern sociology. Statesmen and political philosophers, they contend, should not play the part of prophets but rather confine themselves to investigating social patterns and the ideas that are part of them. Ways might thus be found of promoting the survival and vitality of a given society in its particular setting.

Graham Wallas was concerned to adapt constitutional societies by consent. He wanted to nationalize many essential means of production, including transport and communications, and through increased taxation strengthen social democracy by greater economic and social equality. He was not a revolutionary but a reformer, who understood the precariousness of civilization and the dangers of nationalism, which could only bring, he prophesied, centuries of warfare and regression. He advocated a worldwide and constitutionalist scientific humanism, inspired by the idea of the solidarity of the whole species, for “the master task of civilized mankind is to promote the conditions leading to the good life.”

Other political sociologists who accepted the established order did not expect to improve it. The Italian Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca, a Sicilian-born lawyer, set themselves not to state what they wanted but to record what occurs in society. Pareto’s Mind and Society (1916) is an elaborate, quasi-mathematical classification of nonlogical political myths. Its form is daunting, but its insights are penetrating, especially a hilarious dissection of Rousseau’s General Will, of which, Pareto concludes, “the intrinsic logico-experimental value . . . is zero.” Ranging sardonically over history, Pareto insists that elites will always manipulate society, power merely shifting from one set of rulers to another.

Mosca, in The Ruling Class (1939), analyzed how political myths are exploited. He also concluded that elites everywhere are bound to rule and that the least bad government occurs when abuse of power is checked by legal means; that is, by the rule of law. Mosca admired the liberal constitutionalism of the 19th century, although he was aware of its precariousness and limitations. He argued that there is no total explanation of history, which has always been the unpredictable outcome of competing and interacting interests. One thing is certain, nevertheless: in various forms there will always be a struggle for predominance. Mosca’s views, more clearly set out than Pareto’s, have a salutary realism.

The American philosopher and critic James Burnham also analyzed shifts of power. In The Managerial Revolution (1941) he propounded a theory of bureaucratic revolution: the rulers of the new society, the class with power and privilege, will be the bureaucratic managers of “super states.” In The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom (1943), he reinterprets Machiavelli and cites Mosca as a modern Machiavellian. Following Pareto’s idea of the “circulation of elites,” he asserts that, when a ruling class becomes inadequate, frivolous, or bored, loses confidence in itself and its myths, and becomes irresolute in deploying necessary force, new elites are bound to take over—as in the managerial revolution of the 20th century.

Religious and existentialist approaches

In the second religious and quasi-religious group of political philosophies, the Catholic hierarchy has reiterated its ancient neo-Thomist doctrine of original sin and redemption. Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclicals Inscrutabili Dei Consilio (1878), Immortale Dei (1885), and Rerum Novarum (1891), dismissed all anthropocentric political philosophies as new versions of old heresies. The world, “through an insatiable craving for things perishable,” was “rushing wildly upon the straight road to destruction.” Society is intelligible only in the light of the Christian revelation and a future life:

exclude the idea of futurity and forthwith the very notion of what is good and right would perish, nay, the whole scheme of the universe would become a dark and unfathomable mystery.

Such is the human condition that visionary innovations are fruitless, and “venomous” teachings can only bring “death-bearing fruit.” Society, as St. Augustine had declared, if organized without God, can only be a present hell. Hierarchy, authority, and censorship can alone “control the excesses of the unbridled intellect, which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude.” Property is essential to the family, on which the social order depends, and inequality is inherent in all human societies. Only a harmonious Christian commonwealth can assuage the consequences of sin, and within that social order the state should therefore encourage Christian trade unions and promote the welfare of the poor. Thus, with these views the papacy, maintaining its monopoly of revelation, tried to come to terms with the demands of industrial civilization.

During the rise of 19th-century nationalism and of Communist, Fascist, and Nazi dictatorships, and in face of the increasing dominance of governments and large-scale industry in all mass societies, the importance of individual responsibility with regard to moral issues was emphasized by a divergent group of thinkers who have come to be described as Existentialists. Søren Kierkegaard (died 1855), a Danish philosopher, declared that “truth is subjectivity” and that only by means of inward revelation can man know God. Jean-Paul Sartre, a brilliant French Existentialist, tried to come to terms with dialectical Materialism. His Existentialism and Humanism (1948) comprises an affirmation of human dignity. “If,” he writes, “I have excluded God the Father, there must be someone to invent values.” Man, who has abandoned God, “must liberate himself by some practical commitment,” for only then can he become fully human. Sartre’s elaborate L’Etre et le néant (1943; Eng. trans., Being and Nothingness, 1956) is at once Cartesian and laborious, complete with a “key” to its special and pedantic terms. It investigates the loneliness of the human condition, attitudes to others, love, masochism, indifference, desire, and hate. This intense introspection is even more vividly expressed in his fiction and drama. The Algerian-born Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951) also agonizes brilliantly over the current human condition, and in Man in Revolt he discards hope of pragmatic improvement.

Revolutionary doctrinesThe third stream of contemporary political philosophy is Marxist–Leninist totalitarian and neo-Marxist anarchist. Many of Marx’s original insights into the socio-economic process and its effect on ideas are now generally accepted. His prophecies, on the other hand, have not been fulfilled. The proletarian revolution, for example, came not in an economically advanced country but in one of the most backward; and the state

First, Marxism continued to inspire revolutionary doctrines as well as more-sober political and cultural analyses, some relying on insights borrowed from psychoanalytic theory. Second, liberalism continued to be developed and refined, partly in response to libertarian and communitarian critiques. Third, a line of thought pursued by Michel Foucault and later postmodern philosophers questioned the possibility of objectively valid political values and genuinely neutral political institutions. And fourth, some feminist philosophers argued that the historical domination of men over women in the political and economic spheres reflects the inherently oppressive nature of heterosexual relationships.

The history of political philosophy from Plato until the present day makes plain that modern political philosophy
Marxist doctrines

Although many of Marx’s original insights into socioeconomic processes and their effects on conventional political ideology and culture are now widely accepted, his specific historical prophecies were not fulfilled. The major proletarian revolutions, for example, came not in economically advanced countries but in economically underdeveloped ones (Russia and China), and the supposedly proletarian dictatorships they produced, far from withering away or being diminished by inexorable economic trends, has in fact become became even more powerful both in Communist and in social-democratic countries. Those who have accepted the total Marxist revelation as superseding all else have had thus to adapt and revise it. Hence, much tortuous and artificial debate has ensued. All orthodox Marxists accept the Hegelian position that one can get beyond empirical knowledge and perceive the historically revealed installments of a total explanation. They also start from Marx’s 19th-century belief that economically determined conflicts among feudal, bourgeois, and proletarian classes are the dynamic of history and that the rule of law is not a safeguard for the whole society against arbitrary power but merely the expression of class interestand oppressive than the governments they replaced. Soviet and eastern European communism eventually collapsed in failure in 1989–91, to be replaced in Russia by a quasi-democratic capitalist oligarchy.


The first and by far the most significant interpretation of Marx’s doctrine as was realized in the Soviet Union was made by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and developed by Joseph Stalin and is was entirely authoritarian. According to Marx and Engels, the revolution could occur in Russia only after the bourgeois phase of production had “contradicted” the tsarist order, but Lenin was determined to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the upheaval of World War I and to settle accounts directly with the “accursed heritage of serfdom, of Asiatic barbarism . . . an insult to mankind,” and in 1917 ” In the Russian Revolution of 1917, he engineered a coup that secured the support of the peasantry and the industrial workers. He also adopted the revolutionary theorist Leon Trotsky’s idea of a “permanent revolution” from above by a small revolutionary elite (see Trotskyism).

Already in What Is To to Be Done? (1902), Lenin had argued that an educated elite must had to direct the proletarian revolution, and, when he came to power, he dissolved the constituent assembly and ruled through a “revolutionary and democratic dictatorship supported by the state power of the armed workers.” In asserting the need for an elite of professional revolutionaries to seize power, Lenin reverted to Marx’s program in The Communist Manifesto (1848) rather than conforming to the fated pattern of economic development worked out in Das Kapital, 3 vol. (1867, 1885, 1894).

In 1921 he further adapted theory to the times. His new economic policy New Economic Policy sanctioned the development of a class of prosperous “kulak” kulak peasantry to keep the economy viable. For Lenin always thought in terms of world revolution; , and, in spite of the failure of the Marxists in central Europe and the defeat of the Red armies in Poland, he died in the expectation of a global sequel. Thus, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he had extended the class war into an inevitable conflict between European imperialism and the colonial peoples involved. He had been influenced by the English historian J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism, a Study (1902), which alleged that decadent capitalism was bound to turn from glutted markets at home to exploit the toil of “reluctant and unassimilated peoples.”

But, as observed by classicalClassical, medieval, and modern constitutionalist political philosophers, authoritarian regimes suffer the tensions of all autocracies. Marx himself might have thought that such planned autocracies had made the worst of his revelation.

Other Marxist approachesLukács and Gramsci

Many Marxist revisionists tend tended toward anarchism, stressing the Hegelian and utopian elements of his theory. The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, for example, and the German-born American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who fled from the Nazis to the United States, have Nazi Germany in 1934, won some following in the mid-20th century among those in revolt against both authoritarian “peoples’ democracies” and the diffused capitalism and meritocracy of the managerial welfare state. Lukács’ Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923; Eng. trans., History and Class Consciousness, 1971), a neo-Hegelian work, claims that only the intuition of the proletariat can properly apprehend the totality of history. But world revolution is contingent, not inevitable, and Marxism is an instrument, not a prediction. Lukács renounced this heresy after residence in the Soviet Union under Stalin, but he maintained influence through literary and dramatic criticism. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Lukács advocated peaceful coexistence and intellectual rather than political subversion. In Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (1963; The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (trans. 1963), he again relates Marx to Hegel and even to Aristotle, against the Stalinist claim that Marx made a radically new departure. Lukács’ Lukács’s neo-Marxist literary criticism can be tendentious, but his neo-Hegelian insights, strikingly expressed, have appealed to those anxious eager to salvage the more humane aspects of Marxism and to promote revolution, even against a modified capitalism and social democracy, by intellectual rather than by political means.Marcuse also reached back to the more utopian Marx. Now that most of the proletariat has been absorbed into a conformist managerial capitalism or has been regimented into bureaucratic peoples’ democracies, freedom, argues Marcuse, is in retreat. In Western affluent societies most employers and workers are equally philistine, dominated by the commercialized mass media, or “cogs in

a culture machine.” The former Soviet Union had reverted to an even more philistine monolithic repression, distorting art and literature. This enslavement of man by his own industrial productivity had been clinched by the colossal power of governments, which rendered the old brief and brisk class warfare a romantic, impracticable idea. Marcuse attacked all establishments and transferred the redeeming mission of the proletariat to a fringe of alienated minorities—radical students and the exponents of the “hippie” way of life—as well as to Viet Cong guerrillas and Black Power militants. Such groups, he declared, could apparently form liberating elites and destroy the managerial society. Thus reappeared the old Marxist–Hebraic pattern of redemption through struggle by a chosen people.The Italian Communist Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci deployed a vivid rhetorical talent in attacking existing society. Like Marcuse, Gramsci was alarmed that the proletariat was being assimilated by the capitalist order. He took his stand on the already obsolescent Marxist doctrine of irreconcilable class war between bourgeois and proletariat. He aimed to unmask the bourgeois idea of liberty and to replace parliaments by an “implacable machine” of workers’ councils, which would destroy the current social order through a dictatorship of the proletariat. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is our worst enemy. We must be ready to fight it because it blurs the clear separation of classes.”

Not only would parliamentary democracy and established law be unmasked, but culture , too , would be transformed. A workers’ civilization, with its great industry, large cities, and “tumultuous and intense life,” would create a new civilization with new poetry, art, drama, fashions, and language. Gramsci insisted that the old culture should be destroyed and that education should be wrenched from the grip of the ruling classes and the church.

But this militant revolutionary was also a utopian. He turned bitterly hostile to Stalin’s regime, for he believed, like Engels, that the dictatorship of the workers’ state would wither away. “We do not wish,” he wrote, “to freeze the dictatorship.” Following world revolution, a classless society would emerge, and mankind would be free to master nature instead of being involved in a class war.

Since World War II, Gramsci’s notions have enjoyed a minor revival. They appeal to the fringe of revolutionaries who admire Marcuse and detest the embourgeoisement of an idealized proletariat. But, in a civilization in which, if total war can be avoided, material prospects are good, the destruction of the old culture out of rage, envy, and naïve idealism appears to be a pointless program. Like Marcuse’s doctrine, it is a cry of pain, typical of the 1920s in Italy.


Gramsci was arrested by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1926 and spent the next 11 years in prison; he died shortly after his release for medical care in 1937.

Critical theory
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse

Critical theory, a broad-based Marxist-oriented approach to the study of society, was first developed in the 1920s by the philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Ger. They and other members of the Frankfurt School, as this group came to be called, fled Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The institute was relocated to Columbia University in the United States and remained there until 1949, when it was reestablished in Frankfurt. The most prominent representatives of the Frankfurt School and of critical theory from the mid-20th century were Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas.

The question initially addressed by critical theorists was why the working classes in advanced capitalist countries were generally unmotivated to press for radical social change in their own interests. They attempted to develop a theory of capitalist social relations and to analyze the various forms of cultural and ideological oppression arising from them. They also undertook major studies of fascism and later of dictatorial communist regimes. After World War II, during the era of the Cold War, critical theorists viewed the world as divided between two inherently oppressive models of social development. In these historical circumstances, questions concerning human liberation—what it consists of and how it can be attained—seemed especially urgent.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the celebration of reason by thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment had led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance, exemplified in the 20th century by fascism and totalitarianism. In works published in the 1950s and ’60s, Marcuse attacked both the ideological conformism of managerial capitalism and the bureaucratic oppression of the communist “peoples’ democracies.” In his best-known and most influential work, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964), he argued that the modern capitalist “affluent” society oppresses even those who are successful within it while maintaining their complacency through the ersatz satisfactions of consumer culture. By cultivating such shallow forms of experience and by blocking critical understanding of the real workings of the system, the affluent society condemns its members to a “one-dimensional” existence of intellectual and spiritual poverty. In later works, seeing human freedom as everywhere in retreat, Marcuse transferred the redeeming mission of the proletariat to a relative fringe of radical minorities, including (in the United States) the student New Left and militant groups such as the Black Panther Party.

Critical theorists initially believed that they could liberate people from false beliefs, or “false consciousness,” and in particular from ideologies that served to maintain the political and economic status quo, by pointing out to them that they had acquired these beliefs in irrational ways (e.g., through indoctrination). In the end, however, some theorists, notably Marcuse, wondered whether the forces tending to promote ideological conformity in modern capitalist societies had so compromised the perceptions and reasoning powers of most individuals that no rational critique would ever be effective.


In works published from the 1960s, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas attempted to expand the scope of critical theory by incorporating ideas from contemporary analytic philosophy, in particular the speech act theory developed by J.L. Austin and his student John Searle. Habermas argued that human beings have a fundamental interest in coming to agreement with each other in open rational dialogue. He also held that, in ordinary speech situations, people commit themselves to the truth of the assertions they make; in particular, they implicitly claim that their assertions can be vindicated in an “ideal speech situation”—a dialogue that is completely free and uncoerced, in which no force prevails but that of the better argument.

The notion of an ideal speech situation suggests a certain approach to politics as well. Assuming that “correct” political values and goals are those that everyone would agree to in an ideal speech situation, a political process that produces policies or laws on the basis of forms of communication that are less than ideal (i.e., rationally distorted) is to that extent suspect. The ideal of “deliberative democracy” is thus implicit in Habermas’s ethical analysis of communication (“communicative ethics”), and his own writings explicitly elaborate this point. According to this view, the aim of democratic politics should be to generate a conversation that leads to a rational consensus about the common good. Of course, the ideal by itself does not determine what particular laws or constitutional arrangements ought to exist in any specific society. In this sense, communicative ethics is formal and procedural rather than substantive. Philosophy can define the moral point of view, but it cannot dictate or predict what rational persons would agree to in an ideal discussion aimed at truth.

The development of liberal theory
Logical-positivist interlude

Political and ethical philosophy in English-speaking countries in the first half of the 20th century was inhibited to some extent by the advent in the early 1930s of logical positivism, which conceived of knowledge claims on the model of the hypotheses of natural science. According to the simplest version of logical positivism, genuine knowledge claims can be divided into two groups: (1) those that can be verified or falsified on the basis of observation, or sense experience (empirical claims); and (2) those that are true or false simply by virtue of the conventional meanings assigned to the words they contain (tautologies or contradictions), along with their logical implications. All other claims, including the evaluative assertions made by traditional political and ethical philosophers, are literally meaningless, hence not worth discussing. A complementary view held by some logical positivists was that an evaluative assertion, properly understood, is not a statement of fact but either an expression of the speaker’s attitude (e.g., of approval or disapproval) or an imperative—a speech act aimed at influencing the behaviour of others. This view of the language of ethical and political philosophy tended to limit serious study in those fields until the 1960s, when logical positivism came to be regarded as simplistic in its conceptions of linguistic meaning and scientific practice.


The publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), by the American philosopher John Rawls, spurred a revival of interest in the philosophical foundations of political liberalism. The viability of liberalism was thereafter a major theme of political philosophy in English-speaking countries.

According to the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, liberalism is the conjunction of two ideals: (1) individuals should have liberty of thought and speech and wide freedom to live their lives as they choose (so long as they do not harm others in certain ways), and (2) individuals in any society should be able to determine through majority rule the laws by which they are governed and should not be so unequal in status or wealth that they have unequal opportunities to participate in democratic decision making. Various traditional and modern versions of liberalism differ from each other in their interpretation of these ideals and in the relative importance they assign to them.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls observed that a necessary condition of justice in any society is that each individual should be the equal bearer of certain rights that cannot be disregarded under any circumstances, even if doing so would advance the general welfare or satisfy the demands of a majority. This condition cannot be met by utilitarianism, because that ethical theory would countenance forms of government in which the greater happiness of a majority is achieved by neglecting the rights and interests of a minority. Hence, utilitarianism is unsatisfactory as a theory of justice, and another theory must be sought.

According to Rawls, a just society is one whose major political, social, and economic institutions, taken together, satisfy the following two principles:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a scheme of basic rights and liberties that is the maximum consistent with the same scheme for all.

2. Social and economic inequalities are permissible only if: (a) they confer the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, and (b) they are attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

The basic rights and liberties in principle 1 include the rights and liberties of democratic citizenship, such as the right to vote; the right to run for office in free elections; freedom of speech, assembly, and religion; the right to a fair trial; and, more generally, the right to the rule of law. Principle 1 is accorded strict priority over principle 2, which regulates social and economic inequalities.

Principle 2 combines two ideals. The first, known as the “difference principle,” requires that any unequal distribution of social or economic goods (e.g., wealth) must be such that the least-advantaged members of society would be better off under that distribution than they would be under any other distribution consistent with principle 1, including an equal distribution. (A slightly unequal distribution might benefit the least advantaged by encouraging greater overall productivity.) The second ideal is meritocracy, understood in a very demanding way. According to Rawls, fair equality of opportunity obtains in a society when all persons with the same native talent (genetic inheritance) and the same degree of ambition have the same prospects for success in all competitions for positions that confer special economic and social advantages.

Why suppose with Rawls that justice requires an approximately egalitarian redistribution of social and economic goods? After all, a person who prospers in a market economy might plausibly say, “I earned my wealth. Therefore, I am entitled to keep it.” But how one fares in a market economy depends on luck as well as effort. There is the luck of being in the right place at the right time and of benefiting from unpredictable shifts in supply and demand, but there is also the luck of being born with greater or lesser intelligence and other desirable traits, along with the luck of growing up in a nurturing environment. No one can take credit for this kind of luck, but it decisively influences how one fares in the many competitions by which social and economic goods are distributed. Indeed, sheer brute luck is so thoroughly intermixed with the contributions one makes to one’s own success (or failure) that it is ultimately impossible to distinguish what a person is responsible for from what he is not. Given this fact, Rawls urges, the only plausible justification of inequality is that it serves to render everyone better off, especially those who have the least.

Rawls tries to accommodate his theory of justice to what he takes to be the important fact that reasonable people disagree deeply about the nature of morality and the good life and will continue to do so in any nontyrannical society that respects freedom of speech. He aims to render his theory noncommittal on these controversial matters and to posit a set of principles of justice that all reasonable persons can accept as valid, despite their disagreements.

Libertarian and communitarian critiques

Despite its wide appeal, Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism soon faced challengers. An early conservative rival was libertarianism. According to this view, because each person is literally the sole rightful owner of himself, no one has property rights in anyone else (no person can own another person), and no one owes anything to anyone else. By “appropriating” unowned things, an individual may acquire over them full private ownership rights, which he may give away or exchange. One has the right to do whatever one chooses with whatever one legitimately owns, as long as one does not harm others in specified ways—i.e., by coercion, force, violence, fraud, theft, extortion, or physical damage to another’s property. According to libertarians, Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism is unjust because it would allow (indeed, require) the state to redistribute social and economic goods without their owners’ consent, in violation of their private ownership rights.

The most spirited and sophisticated presentation of the libertarian critique was Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), by the American philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Nozick also argued that a “minimal state,” one that limited its activities to the enforcement of people’s basic libertarian rights, could have arisen in a hypothetical “state of nature” through a process in which no one’s basic libertarian rights are violated. He regarded this demonstration as a refutation of anarchism, the doctrine that the state is inherently unjustified.

Rawls’s theory of justice was challenged from other theoretical perspectives as well. Adherents of communitarianism, such as Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, urged that the shared understanding of a community concerning how it is appropriate to live should outweigh the abstract and putatively impartial requirements of universal justice. Even liberal egalitarians criticized some aspects of Rawls’s theory. Ronald Dworkin, for example, argued that understanding egalitarian justice requires striking the correct balance between an individual’s responsibility for his own life and society’s collective responsibility to provide genuine equal opportunity for all citizens.

Foucault and postmodernism

The work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84) has implications for political philosophy even though it does not directly address the traditional issues of the field. Much of Foucault’s writing is not so much philosophy as it is philosophically informed intellectual history. Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963; The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception), for example, examines the notion of illness and the beginnings of modern medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) studies the origins of the practice of punishing criminals by imprisonment.

One of Foucault’s aims was to undermine the notion that the emergence of modern political liberalism and its characteristic institutions (e.g., individual rights and representative democracy) in the late 18th century resulted in greater freedom for the individual. He argued to the contrary that modern liberal societies are oppressive, though the oppressive practices they employ are not as overt as in earlier times. Modern forms of oppression tend to be hard to recognize as such, because they are justified by ostensibly objective and impartial branches of social science. In a process that Foucault called “normalization,” a supposedly objective social science labels as “normal” or “rational” behaviour that society deems respectable or desirable, so behaviour deemed otherwise becomes abnormal or irrational and a legitimate object of discipline or coercion. Behaviour that is perceived as odd, for example, may be classified as a symptom of mental illness. Foucault viewed modern bureaucratic institutions as exuding a spirit of rationality, scientific expertise, and humane concern but as really amounting to an arbitrary exercise of power by one group over another.

Foucault advocated resistance to the political status quo and the power of established institutions. But he was skeptical of any attempt to argue that one political regime or set of practices is morally superior to another. The use of rational argument to support or oppose a political view, according to Foucault, is merely another attempt to exercise arbitrary power over others. Accordingly, he eschewed any blueprint for political reform or any explicit articulation of moral or rational norms that society ought to uphold. In a 1983 interview he summarized his political attitude in these words:


Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective moral values that could serve as a standard for assessing different political systems or for measuring political progress from one historical period to another. According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), for example, this project represents a secular faith that must be abandoned. In La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) and other writings, Lyotard declared his suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”—putatively rational, overarching accounts, such as Marxism and liberalism, of how the world is or ought to be. He asserted that political conflicts in contemporary societies reflect the clash of incommensurable values and perspectives and are therefore not rationally decidable.

A skepticism of a more thoroughgoing and exuberant kind was expressed in the writings of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). He maintained that any attempt to establish a conclusion by rational means ultimately “deconstructs,” or logically undermines, itself. Because any text can be interpreted in an indefinite number of ways, the search for the “correct” interpretation of a text is always hopeless. Moreover, because everything in the world is a “text,” it is impossible to assert anything as objectively “true.”

Feminism and sexual equality

Hatred and hostility based on racial, ethnic, tribal, and other group divisions gave rise to some of the worst catastrophes of 20th-century history. Political philosophers responded to these developments in diverse ways. Perhaps the most innovative philosophical response to social and political oppression was developed by contemporary feminists seeking to address the domination of women by men.

One interesting account of sexual equality and the obstacles to attaining it emerged in the work of the American feminist legal theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon. She asserted that the struggle to overcome male domination is faced with a deeply entrenched adversary: sexual desire between heterosexual women and men. The subjugation of women in society strongly influences conventional standards of femininity and masculinity, which in turn determine what heterosexual individuals find attractive in the opposite sex. Thus, according to MacKinnon, heterosexual women tend to find dominant men sexually attractive, while heterosexual men tend to find submissive women sexually attractive. The latter is the stronger and more important dynamic, since men as a group are politically, economically, and socially more powerful than women. The upshot is that the ordinary and widespread sexual attraction between heterosexual women and men is corrupted by a kind of sadism. The struggle for equal rights and equal power for women is opposed not only by laws, institutions, and practices but also by sexual desire itself. Given this analysis, the legal and cultural tolerance of pornography, which makes the subordination of women sexually appealing to men, is immoral. Pornography serves only to perpetuate a regime of sex-based domination that any decent society should reject.

Contemporary questions

The history of Western political philosophy from Plato to the present day makes plain that the discipline is still faced with the basic problems defined by the Greeks. The need to redeploy public power in order to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life, for example, has never been so essential. And, if the opportunities for promoting well-being are now far greater, the penalties for the abuse of power are nothing less than the destruction or gross degradation of all life on the planet.

In these circumstances it is of no great importance that some analytical philosophers have declared themselves neutral; they have at least often discredited pretentious metaphysical myths. On the empirical evidence, constitutionalism and the rule of law, with the ancient classic, medieval, and humanist traditions behind them, have proved themselves a more successful response to the environment than tyranny and repression. In the current and more sophisticated view, there are no shortcuts to the millennium. As Mosca points out, utopian ideas become

dangerous when they succeed in bringing a large mass of intellectual and moral energies to bear upon an end that can never be achieved, and that in the day of purported achievement can mean nothing more than the triumph of the worst people and distress and disappointment for the good.

There will perhaps always be a struggle for preeminence in any society, and public laws are necessary to regulate it. Too much cannot be hoped of government, and the best society is that in which tyranny and caprice of power are prevented and in which men are free to create diverse and spontaneous institutions within the framework of law. Only within such a framework of a tolerably well-organized constitutionalism, gradually extended to relations between states, can the swiftly mounting opportunities provided by applied science be taken and the pattern of social life adjusted, so that the human species, instead of being thwarted and deformed by its institutions, can realize its full potentialities.

From another perspective, however, the political problems of the present day are interestingly unique, giving rise to theoretical questions that earlier political philosophers did not have to confront. Two contrasting features of the world in the early 21st century, for example, are the increasing integration of national political and economic systems (see also cultural globalization) and the continuing gross inequality of wealth between developed and less-developed, or underdeveloped, countries. Both features suggest the desirability, even the necessity, of developing political philosophy in order to make it more applicable in a global context. Such considerations have led the Indian economist Amartya Sen and the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum to explore the possibility of a “global” theory of justice. Nussbaum has argued that every inhabitant of the globe is entitled to the conditions that enable one to attain a decent and objectively worthwhile and valuable quality of life. Other philosophers have argued for the justice or necessity of a single world government or of forms of government other than the nation-state.

The advent of nuclear weapons in the mid-20th century increased interest in traditional just-war theory, especially as it applies to the issue of the proportional use of force. Later in the century, the proliferation not only of nuclear but also of chemical and biological weapons made the application of just-war theory to the contemporary scene seem all the more urgent. In the view of some thinkers, the increasing menace of international terrorism in the early 21st century has changed the scope and conditions of justly prosecuted wars, though others vehemently disagree. The nature of terrorism has itself become a philosophically debated question, some philosophers going so far as to assert that terrorism is justified in some real-world circumstances.

The adoption by many countries of liberal-democratic forms of government in the second half of the 20th century, especially after the fall of Soviet and eastern European communism in 1989–91, led some political theorists to speculate that the liberal model of government has been vindicated by history or even (as Francis Fukuyama asserted) that it represents the “end” of history—the culmination of the millennia-long political development of humankind. Be that as it may, many theorists, confident of the basic viability of liberalism, have taken the view that the most important questions of political theory have been settled in liberalism’s favour, and all that remains is to work out the details.

Others are not so convinced. One issue that continues to be troublesome for liberalism is its traditional posture of benevolent neutrality toward religion. Some liberal theorists have proposed that this posture should be extended to all disputed questions concerning what constitutes a good life. Yet millions of people around the world, even in the West, continue to reject the separation of church and state, and millions of others have objected to state policies that allow the pursuit of conceptions of the good life with which they disagree. In these respects, liberalism may be out of sync (rightly or wrongly) with the political aspirations of much of the world’s population.

All this suggests a rather homely conclusion: the future direction of political philosophy, like that of political practice, is uncertain. If anything is likely, it is that there will be much for political philosophers to think about.