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Political Philosophy — Deck 06

Why obey? Why this government, and not another? Who owns the world? Six answers across four centuries — and the standing arguments, still in print, against...

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Why obey? Why this government, and not another? Who owns the world? Six answers across four centuries — and the standing arguments, still in print, against each. Key sections include: The State & Its Critics HOBBES · LOCKE · ROUSSEAU · MARX · RAWLS · NOZICK; The State of Nature; Hobbes — Leviathan, 1651; Locke — Two Treatises, 1689; Rousseau — The Social Contract, 1762; Marx — Capital, 1867; Rawls vs. Nozick; The Wilt Chamberlain Argument; The Crowd; Other Voices.

Key sections

01The State & Its Critics HOBBES · LOCKE · ROUSSEAU · MARX · RAWLS · NOZICK
02The State of Nature
03Hobbes — Leviathan, 1651
04Locke — Two Treatises, 1689
05Rousseau — The Social Contract, 1762
06Marx — Capital, 1867
07Rawls vs. Nozick
08The Wilt Chamberlain Argument
09The Crowd
10Other Voices
11Key Works
12Why It Still Matters
13Go Deeper
14Colophon

Topics covered

philosophy political

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Slide outline

01The State & Its Critics HOBBES · LOCKE · ROUSSEAU · MARX · RAWLS · NOZICK
02The State of Nature
03Hobbes — Leviathan, 1651
04Locke — Two Treatises, 1689
05Rousseau — The Social Contract, 1762
06Marx — Capital, 1867
07Rawls vs. Nozick
08The Wilt Chamberlain Argument
09The Crowd
10Other Voices
11Key Works
12Why It Still Matters
13Go Deeper
14Colophon

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Slide 01

The State & Its Critics HOBBES · LOCKE · ROUSSEAU · MARX · RAWLS · NOZICK

N° 01 / 14
VOL. VI · DECK 06
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
03 · MAY · 2026
Why obey? Why this government, and not another? Who owns the world? Six answers across four centuries — and the standing arguments, still in print, against each.

Slide 02

The State of Nature

N° 02 / 14
All modern political philosophy begins with a thought experiment: what would human life be like without political authority? Three answers, three regimes.
1651
HOBBES
A war of all against all. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (Leviathan, ch. XIII) Without a sovereign to keep us in awe, life is unbearable. Therefore: covenant; absolute sovereign; Leviathan.
1689
LOCKE
A state of equality under natural law, generally peaceful but with "inconveniences" — no impartial judge. Therefore: limited government, by consent, to protect life, liberty, and estate. (Second Treatise on Government)
1755
ROUSSEAU
Originally a state of innocence: solitary, peaceful, free. Civilisation introduces inequality, vanity, dependence. The chains of property and society are forged before the chains of government. (Discourse on Inequality)
Why it matters
The state of nature is rarely meant as history. It is a normative device: by stripping away the institutions we have, we ask what they are for — and so why we should accept the ones we have. Different starting pictures yield different conclusions. Hobbes ends with sovereignty; Locke with limited government; Rousseau with the general will.

Slide 03

Hobbes — Leviathan, 1651

N° 03 / 14
Thomas Hobbes · 1588 — 1679 · Malmesbury · Paris · London
The condition of man... is a condition of war of every one against every one.
Leviathan, Chapter XIII
Hobbes wrote Leviathan in exile in Paris during the English Civil War — a war in which both king and parliament had lost the power to keep the peace. The book is the first great work of modern political theory: materialist, individualist, geometric in ambition.
The argument
By nature, all are roughly equal in body and mind.
Equality breeds equal hope of acquisition; resources are scarce; cooperation is unreliable.
Without a common power to keep all in awe, men are in a state of war — not constant fighting, but constant readiness to fight.
In this condition, no industry, no agriculture, no science, no leisure — only fear and danger of violent death.
Reason therefore prescribes laws of nature, the first of which is to seek peace.
Peace requires that we mutually transfer our right to all things to a sovereign — by covenant, in awe of which all are kept.
The sovereign's power must be absolute; for divided sovereignty is no sovereignty, and we are back to war.
The frontispiece
Hobbes's book is famous for its title page: a giant king, sword in one hand, crozier in the other, towering over a landscape. His body is composed of small figures — the citizens whose covenant he embodies. Above: Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. ("There is no power on earth comparable to him." — Job 41:24)
What's living, what's dead
Hobbes's authoritarianism is unfashionable; his analysis of why we need authority remains the foundation. Schmitt, Oakeshott, Skinner — the great twentieth-century commentators — read Hobbes as the first to take political artifice seriously. The state, on Hobbes's view, is a human creation answerable for its work.

Slide 04

Locke — Two Treatises, 1689

N° 04 / 14
John Locke · 1632 — 1704 · Wrington · Oxford · Holland
Men being, as has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent.
Second Treatise on Government, §95
Property
The famous argument of Chapter V. The earth is given to mankind in common. But every person owns themselves and the labour of their body. By mixing labour with what is held in common, one makes it one's own — provided "enough, and as good" is left for others, and that nothing spoils.
Money loosens the spoilage proviso — gold does not rot. Locke is sometimes read as licensing inequality; sometimes (by C. B. Macpherson) as the theorist of "possessive individualism."
Consent
Government's authority derives from the consent of the governed. Tacit consent — using roads, trading under laws — counts. So does, controversially, the right of revolution: when government violates its trust, "the people are at liberty to provide for themselves by erecting a new legislative." (§220)
The American echo
Locke's vocabulary — "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Locke wrote "estate") — runs straight into the Declaration of Independence (1776). The Federalist Papers cite him by name. The Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment's protection of property, the very habit of justifying state action in terms of consent — all are, in part, Lockean.
The Atlantic shadow
Locke also held shares in the Royal African Company; the chapter "Of Slavery" in the Second Treatise is uncomfortable reading. Modern interpreters (Bernasconi, Mehta) have argued that Lockean liberalism was, from the beginning, entangled with empire and racial hierarchy. The argument is alive.

Slide 05

Rousseau — The Social Contract, 1762

N° 05 / 14
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1712 — 1778 · Geneva · Paris · Ermenonville
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
The Social Contract, Book I, opening
Rousseau is the most contradictory of the great moderns. Composer, novelist, autodidact, exile, paranoid, friend then enemy of every philosophe in Paris. The Social Contract is the political manifesto; Émile the book on education; the Discourses the historical-anthropological vision; the Confessions the first modern autobiography.
The general will — la volonté générale
Not the will of all (the sum of private interests), but the will the citizens have when they aim at the common good. Legitimate law expresses the general will. To be forced to obey it is to be "forced to be free" (I.7) — the most contested phrase in the book; read either as Kantian autonomy or as totalitarian seed, depending on the reader.
The argument
Original humans were free; no one had legitimate authority over another.
Civilisation — property, division of labour, comparison — produced inequality and dependence.
Existing political orders ratify that inequality: chains.
Legitimate political order can only arise from the agreement of the people themselves.
That agreement constitutes a "general will" aimed at the common good.
The state is legitimate to the extent that its law expresses the general will, and citizens are then both subjects and sovereigns.
Aftermath
Rousseau died eleven years before the French Revolution. The Jacobins read him devotionally; Robespierre kept a copy of The Social Contract in his pocket. The terror was carried out partly in his name — though Rousseau, who hated cities and crowds, would have been appalled.

Slide 06

Marx — Capital, 1867

N° 06 / 14
Karl Marx · 1818 — 1883 · Trier · Paris · Brussels · London
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Manifesto of the Communist Party · 1848
Three layers
Materialist conception of history — the mode of production conditions political and intellectual life. Hand-mill gives feudal lord; steam-mill, industrial capitalist.
Critique of political economy — labour theory of value; surplus value extracted in the wage relation; the falling rate of profit; commodity fetishism.
Theory of revolution — capitalism produces its own gravediggers in the proletariat. The state withers as classes dissolve.
Alienation — 1844 Manuscripts
Under capitalism, the worker is alienated from: (a) the product of their labour, (b) the act of labour itself, (c) their species-being (productive cooperation), and (d) other workers, who become competitors. Alienation is the key category of the early Marx; it links his philosophical anthropology to his political economy.
Why he is here
Marx is not, strictly, a political philosopher in the Locke or Rawls sense — he says little about institutional design after the revolution. But his critique reframed the question. After Marx, no liberal theorist could ignore the question: do formal liberties matter when material inequalities make them unusable?
Twentieth-century inheritances
Lenin, Stalin, Mao — each is a chapter; none uncontested. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) developed Marxian critique of culture without revolutionary politics. Analytical Marxism (Cohen, Roemer, Elster) re-tooled Marx with formal methods. He remains a rolling argument.

Slide 07

Rawls vs. Nozick

N° 07 / 14
In 1971 the Harvard professor John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, reviving political philosophy after a generation of analytic neglect. Three years later, his colleague Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia — a libertarian rebuttal so elegant it became a standard.
1971
RAWLS
1921 — 2002 · Harvard
Justice as fairness
Behind the veil of ignorance — not knowing your gender, race, talents, wealth, or conception of the good — what principles would you choose for your society?
Liberty: Each is to have the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all.
Difference: Inequalities are permitted only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged, and offices are open to all under fair equality of opportunity.
Lexical priority: liberty first, then opportunity, then the difference principle.
1974
NOZICK
1938 — 2002 · Harvard
Entitlement theory
A distribution is just if it arose from a just past — by:
Acquisition: the original appropriation of unheld things.
Transfer: voluntary exchange or gift.
Rectification: correction of past injustices.
"Liberty upsets patterns." (Wilt Chamberlain) Any pattern of distribution will be disrupted by free choices, and to maintain it requires constant interference. Therefore: minimal state, restricted to protection.

Slide 08

The Wilt Chamberlain Argument

N° 08 / 14
Nozick's most famous thought experiment, designed to break "patterned" theories of justice (including Rawls's).
Imagine a distribution D1 that you regard as perfectly just — equal, or Rawlsian, or whatever.
Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star, signs a contract: 25 cents from each ticket goes to him, on top of his salary.
A million fans freely choose to pay the surcharge, because they very much want to see him play.
Now Chamberlain has $250,000 more than anyone else; the distribution is D2.
D2 emerged from a series of voluntary exchanges starting from a just D1.
If D2 is unjust, you must say one of (a) the original D1 was unjust, or (b) voluntary exchange between consenting adults can produce injustice.
If you reject both (a) and (b), then D2 is just — and patterned theories of distributive justice are false.
Cohen's reply
The Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen, in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (1995), argued that the choice scenario assumes background institutions — money, property, contracts — that already encode controversial distributive principles. The exchange "consents" to those institutions only after they are in place.

Slide 09

The Crowd

N° 09 / 14
Politics happens at a scale no individual can take in. Hobbes saw the multitude as a danger; Rousseau hoped to discipline it through the general will; Marx looked for in it the agent of history; Rawls modelled it as a committee of strangers behind a veil. Photographs of the crowd remind us that the abstractions answer to a body, breathing and tired and angry, in a particular street.

Slide 10

Other Voices

N° 10 / 14
FEMINIST
CAROLE PATEMAN
The Sexual Contract (1988): the social contract presupposes a prior, unwritten contract by which men gain political control over women. The "individuals" of contract theory are gendered.
RACE
CHARLES MILLS
The Racial Contract (1997): a parallel argument. The social contract was, in fact, a racial contract — granting full personhood only to whites; reading it neutrally hides this.
CAPABILITY
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
With Amartya Sen: ask not what people have but what they can do and be. A list of central capabilities (life, bodily health, affiliation, play...) as the metric of justice.
REPUBLICAN
PHILIP PETTIT
Republicanism (1997): freedom is not non-interference (liberalism) but non-domination — not living at the mercy of another's will, even a benign one.
DELIBERATIVE
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
Legitimacy comes from the "ideal speech situation" — public reasoning under conditions free of coercion. Between Facts and Norms (1992).
POSTCOLONIAL
FRANTZ FANON
The Wretched of the Earth (1961): colonialism's psychology, and the politics of decolonisation. A different starting point for thinking about the state.

Slide 11

Key Works

N° 11 / 14
AuthorWorkYearNote
PlatoRepublicc. 380 BCEjustice and the ideal city
AristotlePoliticsc. 335 BCE"man is by nature a political animal"
AugustineCity of God413–426two cities, two loves
AquinasDe Regimine Principumc. 1267natural law and government
MachiavelliThe Prince1513realpolitik
HobbesLeviathan1651founding modern contract theory
LockeTwo Treatises of Government1689consent, property, revolution
RousseauThe Social Contract1762general will
BurkeReflections on the Revolution in France1790founding modern conservatism
WollstonecraftA Vindication of the Rights of Woman1792founding feminist political theory
MillOn Liberty1859harm principle
Marx & EngelsManifesto of the Communist Party1848
MarxCapital, vol. I1867critique of political economy
ArendtThe Human Condition1958action, vita activa
RawlsA Theory of Justice1971justice as fairness
NozickAnarchy, State, and Utopia1974libertarian reply
SandelLiberalism and the Limits of Justice1982communitarian critique

Slide 12

Why It Still Matters

N° 12 / 14
Every news headline of the early twenty-first century is, when traced down, a quarrel one of these authors framed. Sovereignty, borders, war powers, the relation of the state of emergency to the rule of law — Hobbes saw the bones of those debates clearly in 1651.
Property, taxation, who has standing to revolt, on what occasion — Locke's Second Treatise still governs much of the rhetoric of American constitutional argument, even when his name is not invoked. He is a presence in every dispute over the just acquisition of resources, including the disputes over restitution he helped, in his own day, to obscure.
Equality of what? The Rawls–Sen–Nussbaum debate set the terms in which we now ask whether to measure progress by income, by capabilities, by happiness, by carbon. International institutions (the UN, the World Bank, the OECD) borrow from this vocabulary daily.
The Marxist questions about labour, surplus, ownership, and class have been driven out of polite economic discourse and back in again at least three times since 1970. They are unlikely to leave for good while the technologies that intensify the wage relation continue to develop.
And the Nozickean question — by what right does the state coerce me? — is the question to which every theory of taxation, conscription, regulation, and prohibition is, in the end, an answer.
Political philosophy is not a luxury. It is what we are doing badly when we stop doing it well.

Slide 13

Go Deeper

N° 13 / 14
Michael Sandel's Harvard "Justice" lectures, free on YouTube, are the best public introduction to the field — Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Locke, Rawls, all in succession. The In Our Time on the social contract is also worth an hour.
Watch · Sandel · Justice (Harvard)
Watch · BBC In Our Time · Social Contract
Further reading
Quentin Skinner · The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols.)
Will Kymlicka · Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction
Iris Marion Young · Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990)
Adam Swift · Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians

Slide 14

Colophon

N° 14 / 14
All political theory is the heir of the Greek polis. The disagreement is about who counts as a citizen.
Deck 06 of Philosophy · Vol. VI · The Deck Catalog

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