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Political Philosophy — Justice, Power, the State

Being a brief inquiry into the foundations of authority, the just distribution of goods, and the legitimate use of force among free persons.

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Being a brief inquiry into the foundations of authority, the just distribution of goods, and the legitimate use of force among free persons. Key sections include: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; Justice , Power, & the State; The Fundamental Inquiries; The Republic & the Just City; Man as Political Animal; Leviathan — the Mortal God; Natural Rights & Consent; The General Will; Class, Labour, & Capital; Liberty & the Harm Principle.

Key sections

  • 01POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
  • 02Justice , Power, & the State
  • 03The Fundamental Inquiries
  • 04The Republic & the Just City
  • 05Man as Political Animal
  • 06Leviathan — the Mortal God
  • 07Natural Rights & Consent
  • 08The General Will
  • 09Class, Labour, & Capital
  • 10Liberty & the Harm Principle
  • 11Justice as Fairness
  • 12The Libertarian Rejoinder
  • 13Modern Currents & Contests
  • 14Sources & Further Study

Topics covered

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Slide outline
  1. 01POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
  2. 02Justice , Power, & the State
  3. 03The Fundamental Inquiries
  4. 04The Republic & the Just City
  5. 05Man as Political Animal
  6. 06Leviathan — the Mortal God
  7. 07Natural Rights & Consent
  8. 08The General Will
  9. 09Class, Labour, & Capital
  10. 10Liberty & the Harm Principle
  11. 11Justice as Fairness
  12. 12The Libertarian Rejoinder
  13. 13Modern Currents & Contests
  14. 14Sources & Further Study
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Slide 01

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

  • ⚔
  • Res Publica
  • MMXXVI
  • ⚖
  • Sigillum
  • Iustitiae
  • A Treatise in Thirteen Folios
  • Justice, Power, & the State
  • Being a brief inquiry into the foundations of authority, the just
  • distribution of goods, and the legitimate use of force among free persons.
  • Folio I · Press the right arrow to proceed
Slide 02

The Fundamental Inquiries

  • Folio the Second · Of First Questions
  • Political philosophy begins where obedience grows uncertain. Two questions stand at its threshold and have not ceased to vex thinkers from Athens to the present hour: By what right does one human being command another? And by what measure shall we call any social order just?
  • Authority — Why must I obey? Force, consent, divine sanction, tradition, utility, or reason?
  • Justice — Who gets what, and on what ground? Desert, need, equality, liberty, or fairness?
  • Liberty — What may the state forbid me, and what must it leave to my own judgment?
  • The Common Good — Is there a public interest distinct from the sum of private wills?
  • ~ Folio II ~
Slide 03

The Republic & the Just City

  • III
  • Φ
  • Kallipolis
  • c. 380 BC
  • Folio the Third · Plato of Athens
  • In the Republic, Plato proposes that justice is not a contract among the strong but the harmony of the soul writ large in the city. As the soul has three parts — reason, spirit, appetite — so the polis has three classes: the philosopher-rulers who know the Good, the auxiliary guardians who defend, and the producers who labor.
  • The Tripartite City
  • Rulers rule, guardians guard, producers produce — each doing their proper work. Justice is this minding-of-one’s-own.
  • The Philosopher-King
  • Until philosophers are kings, or kings philosophers, cities will have no rest from evil. Knowledge of the Form of the Good must crown political power.
  • “Justice in the city and justice in the soul are the same writing — only larger letters.”— Plato, Republic, Bk. II
  • ~ Folio III ~
Slide 04

Man as Political Animal

  • Folio the Fourth · Aristotle of Stagira
  • Aristotle, more empirical than his teacher, observed that the polis comes into being for the sake of mere life and continues for the sake of the good life. Humanity, alone among animals, possesses logos — speech and reason — and is by nature ordered toward the political community. He who can live without it is either a beast or a god.
  • The polis is prior to the individual — not in time, but in nature; the whole gives meaning to its parts.
  • Six regimes — Monarchy, Aristocracy, Polity (just); Tyranny, Oligarchy, Democracy (corrupt).
  • Mixed regime — The best practical constitution blends elements of the few and the many; a strong middle class is its anchor.
  • Distributive justice — Equals treated equally, unequals unequally, in proportion to relevant merit.
  • “Man is by nature a political animal.”— Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I
  • ~ Folio IV ~
Slide 05

Leviathan — the Mortal God

  • ☥
  • Pactum
  • A.D. 1651
  • Folio the Fifth · Thomas Hobbes · 1651
  • Writing amid the carnage of the English Civil Wars, Hobbes envisioned the natural condition of mankind as a war of every man against every man. In that state, he wrote his most famous lines, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
  • To escape this terror, rational persons covenant together, surrendering their right of private judgment to a single sovereign — the Leviathan, an artificial person whose body is composed of the multitude. Absolute, indivisible, and undivided, this Mortal God alone can guarantee peace. To divide sovereignty is to invite the return of war.
  • “Covenants without the sword are but words.”— Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. XVII
  • ~ Folio V ~
Slide 06

Natural Rights & Consent

  • Folio the Sixth · John Locke · 1689
  • Where Hobbes saw a state of nature defined by fear, Locke saw one governed by reason: a condition of perfect freedom but not of license, in which all are equal and independent, and none ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Government is instituted not to grant these rights, which are antecedent and natural, but to secure them.
  • Three Natural Rights
  • Life, Liberty, and Property — each grounded in the law of nature, knowable by reason. Property arises when one mixes labor with the common stock.
  • Consent & Trust
  • Legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed. When it betrays its trust — turning tyrant — the people retain the right of revolution.
  • “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”— Locke, Second Treatise § 57
  • ~ Folio VI ~
Slide 07

The General Will

  • VII
  • ⚘
  • Volonté
  • A.D. 1762
  • Folio the Seventh · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
  • “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” With this incendiary sentence Rousseau opens The Social Contract and indicts every existing regime. The puzzle, as he frames it, is to find a form of association which defends and protects the person and goods of each, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.
  • The General Will — not the sum of private interests (the will of all), but the rational will of the citizen body aimed at the common good.
  • Popular Sovereignty — sovereignty resides inalienably in the people; it cannot be represented, only exercised.
  • Civil Liberty — we exchange natural independence for moral freedom, obedience to a law we prescribe ourselves.
  • “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to be free.”— Rousseau, Du contrat social, Bk. I, ch. 7
  • ~ Folio VII ~
Slide 08

Class, Labour, & Capital

  • VIII
  • Folio the Eighth · Karl Marx · 1848 & 1867
  • For Marx, the political question cannot be answered without first answering the economic one. The history of all hitherto existing society, he and Engels declare, is the history of class struggle. The state is not a neutral arbiter standing above the fray but, in any class society, an instrument by which the dominant class secures its position.
  • ConceptDescription
  • Labour Theory of ValueThe value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time embodied in it.
  • Surplus ValueWhat the worker produces above the value of their wage; appropriated by the owner of capital.
  • AlienationUnder capitalist production the worker is estranged from product, process, species-being, and fellow worker.
  • Means of ProductionJustice requires collective ownership of the productive forces; the political question is, in the end, the question of who owns.
  • “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”— Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI
  • ~ Folio VIII ~
Slide 09

Liberty & the Harm Principle

  • ⚙
  • De Libertate
  • A.D. 1859
  • Folio the Ninth · John Stuart Mill · 1859
  • Mill, writing in an age fearful of the tyranny of the majority no less than of kings, proposed a single, simple principle to govern the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control. It is, he wrote, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.
  • The Harm Principle
  • Power may be rightfully exercised over a member of a civilised community against his will only to prevent harm to others. His own good is not sufficient warrant.
  • Liberty of Thought
  • Free expression even of false opinions is essential: truth gains by collision with error; received opinion not so contested becomes dead dogma.
  • “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”— Mill, On Liberty, ch. I
  • ~ Folio IX ~
Slide 10

Justice as Fairness

  • Folio the Tenth · John Rawls · 1971
  • Rawls revived political philosophy in the analytic age by means of a thought-experiment of remarkable elegance. Imagine, he asks, that we are to choose the principles of justice for our society from behind a veil of ignorance — not knowing our class, race, sex, talents, or conception of the good. What rules would a rational, risk-averse person consent to from such an Original Position?
  • From this position, Rawls argues, we would choose two principles. First, equal basic liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are tolerable only insofar as (a) they attach to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged — the famous difference principle.
  • ~ Folio X ~
Slide 11

The Libertarian Rejoinder

  • ⚜
  • Minimal State
  • A.D. 1974
  • Folio the Eleventh · Robert Nozick · 1974
  • Three years after Rawls, Nozick replied in Anarchy, State, and Utopia with a stark counterpoint: individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating those rights. Patterned theories of justice — redistributing according to need, merit, or the Rawlsian formula — require constant interference with the free choices of free people.
  • Entitlement Theory — A holding is just if acquired justly (initial acquisition) or transferred justly (voluntary exchange, gift, inheritance). History matters, not pattern.
  • The Wilt Chamberlain Argument — Any pattern of distribution is overturned by free transactions. Liberty upsets patterns.
  • Minimal State — Only a state limited to the protection of persons, property, and contracts is justified. Anything more violates rights.
  • Taxation as Forced Labour — Taking the fruits of one’s labour for redistributive ends is, on Nozick’s view, on a par with forced labour.
  • “The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified.”— Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
  • ~ Folio XI ~
Slide 12

Modern Currents & Contests

  • XII
  • Folio the Twelfth · The Present Hour
  • The contemporary scene is no settled consensus but a contest of approaches, each illuminating what others obscure. Liberalism, communitarianism, republicanism, critical race theory, feminist political theory, and post-colonial thought all stake claims on the unfinished question of how we should live together.
  • Deliberative Democracy
  • Habermas and others: legitimacy arises not merely from voting but from inclusive, reasoned public discourse aimed at mutual justification.
  • Capabilities Approach
  • Sen and Nussbaum: justice should secure not goods or preferences but real capabilities — what persons are actually able to do and be.
  • Authoritarian Resurgence — The 21st century has seen democratic recession, illiberal majoritarianism, and renewed contests over the rule of law.
  • Global Justice — Cosmopolitan thinkers ask whether the demands of justice halt at borders, or extend to the species as a whole.
  • The Digital Polis — Platforms, algorithms, and surveillance reshape the public sphere and the conditions of free political agency.
  • ~ Folio XII ~
Slide 13

Sources & Further Study

  • XIII
  • ✝
  • Finis
  • Colophon
  • Folio the Thirteenth · Of References & Further Lectures
  • Primary Texts
  • Plato — The Republic
  • Aristotle — Politics; Nicomachean Ethics
  • Hobbes — Leviathan (1651)
  • Locke — Two Treatises of Government (1689)
  • Rousseau — The Social Contract (1762)
  • Mill — On Liberty (1859)
  • Marx — Capital, Vol. I (1867)
  • Rawls — A Theory of Justice (1971)
  • Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
  • Modern Companions
  • Sen — The Idea of Justice
  • Nussbaum — Creating Capabilities
  • Habermas — Between Facts and Norms
  • Sandel — Justice: What’s the Right Thing?
  • Skinner — Liberty Before Liberalism
  • Levitsky & Ziblatt — How Democracies Die
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — entries on Justice, Authority, Liberty
  • Lectures on YouTube
  • Search: Political philosophy — lecture
  • Search: Rawls — veil of ignorance
  • Sealed and set forth this Second day of May, in the year MMXXVI.
  • ~ Finis ~
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