The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 76 pps

H. Skolimowski, Polish Analytical Philosophy (London, 1967).
J. Wolen´ski, Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov–Warsaw School (Dor-
drecht, 1989).
political obligation. The sense or fact of being bound to
obey the laws of a political community and the commands
of its legally constituted officers and/or to act consistently
in ways that serve the common good. Principled refusals
of obligation can take the form of treason, rebellion, pas-
sive resistance or disobedience, and conscientious objec-
tion (the last of these is sometimes legally recognized in
specific cases; military service is the most common
example). How an individual, originally free of all bonds,
comes to be obligated is perhaps the central question of
liberal political theory. It is usually answered by pointing
to some intentional act or presumed show of intention,
taken as the political equivalent of a promise. (*Consent.)
Just as unreasonable promises (to live as a slave or to com-
mit suicide) or promises made under duress or without
full understanding are not binding, so with acts of consent:
free individuals cannot obligate themselves to obey a dic-
tator or a totalitarian regime (the political equivalent of
accepting slavery); even more obviously, unfree individ-
uals cannot do so: their declarations of commitment have
no moral effect at all.
Political theorists from other traditions (conservatives,
communitarians, rationalists of various sorts) who doubt
the liberal starting-point, the reality of original freedom,
commonly regard individuals as bound whether they con-
sent or not—born bound or objectively constrained. But
they too must address the limits of this obligation, arguing
either that only regimes of a certain sort (which maintain

just social arrangements or support the good life or are, at
least, very old) can bind their subjects or that individuals
are released from pre-existing obligations by specific acts
of tyranny or oppression.
It is entirely possible, however, to deny the existence of
anything like political obligation. On this view, there are
only moral duties, which sometimes require individuals
to obey, sometimes to disobey, the laws of the state, some-
times to serve, sometimes to refuse to serve, the interests
of the community. Since political communities are always
morally imperfect, no general obligation is possible;
judgement is necessary at every moment. If this is right,
then citizenship loses much of its specific moral character.
For a citizen, as the term is usually understood, is a person
with a particular set of political obligations—to these
other people (fellow citizens) and to the community they
constitute. Some of the actions that follow from such
obligations would still be morally required, but they
would now be required of all capable persons. The particu-
larist reference, however, might well be immoral, since it
deprives non-citizens of equal attention and regard, and
hence is required of no one at all.
Assuming that there is such a thing as political obliga-
tion, it is an interesting question whether it is singular in
character: are all obligated persons bound in the same way
or to the same degree? Other particularist obligations (to
friends or relatives, say) vary in their intensity and reach
depending on the nature of the relationship and of the
commitments actually made. The test case here is perhaps
the resident alien, who is commonly conceived to have

some, though not all, of the obligations of a citizen. But
what about citizens variously disadvantaged or disengaged
or committed elsewhere? Can all citizens be equally bound
to vote, pay taxes, serve on juries, and so on, even though
they are not equally benefited by these activities and by the
acts of state they make possible, and even though they are
not equally committed to or equally approving of this
political regime and its characteristic works? m.walz.
*civil disobedience; equality; political violence.
Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of
Liberal Theory (Chichester, 1979).
A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Prince-
ton, NJ, 1979).
Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citi-
zenship (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
political philosophy, history of. Political philosophy
evaluates social organization, especially government,
from an ethical viewpoint, but also studies the facts about
social organization. There are thus two not sharply distin-
guishable aspects of political philosophy, and how they
ought to be related is a good question: the ethically nor-
mative aspect (‘ethics’), and the descriptive-explanatory.
Arguably, some close connection between these aspects is
necessary for political philosophy to flourish, and the his-
tory of political philosophy can be interpreted in this
light. Among ethical concepts, *autonomy, or *freedom as
rational self-determination, is central, but other concepts,
including *justice, *democracy, *rights, and *political
obligation, are also fundamental. The important concepts
of a political philosophy must be combined coherently

into an account of a properly structured and functioning
community. In the history of political philosophy, the
term ‘community’, or its synonyms or translations, is
sometimes prominent, sometimes not, and when used it
may have very varying meaning. Political philosophy as
such, however, arguably tends to aspire to an account of a
appropriately structured and functioning community,
with its main constitutive institutions and values. Which
institutions are emphasized is one of the interesting vari-
ables in the history of political philosophy. Institutional
detail, for example, provides an essential framework for
interpreting what is meant by autonomy, if that notion
plays a role in a political philosophy.
Plato’s Republic is the beginning. This colossal work,
whose main subject is justice in the individual and the
state, contains conceptual analysis crucial for both ethics
and descriptive-explanatory inquiry. Plato attempts to
define what justice is, first as a matter of individual just
action, and eventually as a characteristic of the just indi-
vidual and the just society. Plato wishes to show how, for
the individual, being just can be a good in itself. In the just
individual, the three parts of the psyche are so ordered that
reason rules, the ‘spirited’ part of the psyche responds to
730 Polish philosophy
reason, and the appetites obey. In the just state, there is a
supposedly corresponding clear division of classes among
the rulers (qualified as such chiefly by personal capacity,
eugenics, careful and lengthy education, life conditions
including absence of personal property and of family, and
ultimately a knowledge of the Form of the Good), the sol-

dier auxiliaries, and the bulk of the population. We should
value justice not only for its extrinsic advantages, but also
for its own sake, because only when just are we really
happy or flourishing. Arguably Plato has a concept of
autonomy (and may well be an important contributor to
the theory of autonomy) but thinks it is a realistic goal
only for the few who are fit to rule, in contrast to some
later authors who expand the group whose autonomy
ought to be expressed or promoted through politics.
Arguably, also, Plato’s approach to political philosophy is
weakened by his utopianism and his anti-empirical theory
of knowledge, dominated by a certain picture of math-
ematical knowledge. Plato’s attack on the arts is another
notable feature of his views. It suggests to some modern
readers that Plato’s notion of reason ruling in the individ-
ual and community downgrades much emotion, espe-
cially sympathetic identification across class lines. The arts
as institutions in Plato’s community are to be subject to
strict state controls. Plato’s political philosophy, although
anxious about arts institutions, thus at least pays them the
tribute of close attention.
Aristotle, Plato’s student, like him insists that the city
state ( polis) is higher than the individual. In this sense,
community matters more than the individual for Aris-
totle, as it did for Plato. Aristotle is often said to be more
empirically minded than Plato. His aversion to *utopian-
ism, his classification of different sorts of constitutions
and states, and other points are often adduced to show
that Aristotle emphasizes more than his teacher the
descriptive-explanatory component of political philoso-

phy. Although this is true, Aristotle’s work in ethics and
his politics cannot be understood apart from one another.
The point of ethical theory is the improvement of moral
education, carried on especially though not exclusively by
the polis. The statesman should apply ethical theory to
promote happiness (*eudaimonia), an activity of the soul in
accordance with virtue. The promotion of happiness
requires morally educating persons into the appropriate
virtues. Arguably Aristotle is a ‘perfectionist’ in politics
(who thinks a social system is justified by producing some
persons of excellence, rather than by taking account of the
flourishing of all). He has been criticized for toleration of
slavery and the subordinate status of women, cultural
chauvinism (including his low estimation of non-Greek
‘barbarians’), and his acceptance of class divisions. As to
autonomy, some think Aristotle lacks the notion. It might
be argued, however, that Aristotle’s virtue of practical
wisdom (phrone¯sis) comes close to doing some of the work
that autonomy does in some later philosophers. The per-
son educated into phrone¯sis has a capacity to recognize the
relevant principles or reasons in deciding what to do, in
relation to happiness or flourishing. Like any virtue or
vice, phrone¯sis is in some sense allegedly voluntary, and
one deserves praise for it, although this is in some ways
puzzling. The virtues and vices in general require a good
polis for their development, which suggests that it is not
entirely up to the individual whether to become virtuous
or vicious. Aristotle never resolves this apparent conflict
between ethical assessment and his explanation of how
virtue develops.

Little will be said about the period between Aristotle
and the rise of modernity. This is not for lack of important
political philosophy, such as Augustine’s City of God or
Aquinas’s extension of Aristotelianism. Perhaps the major
issue bequeathed to Western modernity by Augustine and
by Aquinas and others from the medieval part of that
period is the question of the proper relation between reli-
gious authority and political authority. (One way to
express this question is to ask for an account of human
community that appropriately combines religious and
political institutions.) Aquinas in particular expounds
views which give human government the role of provid-
ing the conditions for attainment of ultimately religious
goals. His views allow human government some author-
ity, which may, however, be resisted under certain cir-
cumstances, when it deviates from its proper function.
The question of the proper role of religious and political
institutions in a community is still very much alive.
Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy might be
viewed as an attempt to lay the foundation for what was
developing as the modern secular nation state. Hobbes
none the less and very logically also discusses various non-
governmental institutions supportive of government and
fitting into a larger picture of community. The Hobbesian
community, however, with its tendency towards individ-
ualist egoism, is very far from what some have meant by
the notion of community. In his Leviathan Hobbes insists
on the importance of avoiding by means of a strong sover-
eign the war of all against all of the *state of nature. Given
men’s desires, it is rational for them to agree to abide by

the laws of a sovereign who provides them with security.
Despite Hobbes’s authoritarianism, his work also leads to
the thought that if the sovereign does not provide appro-
priate protections, the point of abiding by the law is lost.
Hobbes is much influenced by materialism and geometric
method, as well as by hostility to Catholicism and to indi-
vidualistic Puritanism.
Some scholars argue that John Locke must not be read
as replying directly to Hobbes’s political philosophy,
though a more complex Lockean reaction to Hobbes can
be acknowledged. In the First Treatise of Government
Locke’s target is the patriarchal religious traditionalism of
Sir Robert Filmer. Here, and to a lesser extent in the more
widely read Second Treatise, religion plays a significant role
in Locke’s politics, along with rationality and empiricism.
In the Second Treatise Locke holds that ‘Civil Government is
the proper Remedy for the Inconveniences of the State of
Nature.’ Above all, government is necessary for the pro-
tection of a right to property. Locke founds legitimate
government on the *consent of the governed, and affirms
political philosophy, history of 731
constitutionalism and the right of revolution. Locke
might plausibly be read as an expositor of a form of posi-
tive freedom, a freedom requiring government and law in
order to be realized. A comparison with Rousseau on this
point will be instructive.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract has been plaus-
ibly interpreted as an attempt to define a form of political
organization in which autonomy and political *authority
can be reconciled, a state in which there is a moral obliga-

tion to obey the law. Rousseau’s work is very much an
attempt to picture an appropriately arranged community,
with an emphasis on the authoritative state but also with
some attention to subordinate institutions such as religion
and the family. Rousseau seems to recognize two stages of
the social *contract. Presumably in the first stage there is
unanimity about the binding authority of majority votes.
For this unanimity to be more than a mere contingency,
presumably Rousseau thinks that reasons could be given
appealing to our capacity for rational self-determination to
show why majoritarianism is a decision-making rule to be
embraced. On one way of reading Rousseau, he may think
a theorem by Condorcet supplies an argument why
(under the circumstances Rousseau assumes) we should
subsequently prefer majority judgements over individual
judgements about the common good. This arguably
makes it seem autonomous for an individual to accept the
majority’s judgement who subsequently votes on what
the law should be (under the circumstances Rousseau
describes) and finds himself in a minority. All citizens
(males: a very regrettable expression of Rousseau’s sex-
ism) vote on whether a law should be passed, sincerely
aiming at the common good, with approximate equality of
influence on the outcome (presumably one reason for
absence of discussion). The effort is to determine the *gen-
eral will, which aims at the common good. The general
will itself ‘cannot err’. It aims at a law of general form
which also furthers the general interest, not mere particu-
lar interests. If anyone shows partiality, if factions develop,
if economic inequality allows some to buy others or

requires some to sell themselves, or other failures occur,
the social contract is nullified. Otherwise, the law passed
by the majority is morally binding on the citizen who has
participated in making it. Direct participation is vital; rep-
resentation will not do. Many interpreters have doubted,
on numerous grounds, whether Rousseau’s scheme really
preserves autonomy. Rousseau is actually pessimistic him-
self about the prospects for real-world instances of recon-
ciliation of autonomy and authority. In general, Rousseau
(although a great psychologist) is not very helpful on the
descriptive and explanatory side of political theory, and
not very helpful about telling us what to do to promote the
main goals of his politics under the refractory circum-
stances of actual history. He tends toward scorn of corrupt
realities and a sometimes wistful utopianism. For all that,
in Rousseau a version of autonomy is at work which has
been enormously influential. One sign of this, ironically, is
in the seriousness with which influential political leaders
(e.g. Robespierre, Bolivar) have taken Rousseau, even
when they should have found it difficult to justify their acts
on the basis of Rousseau’s ideas. Rousseau’s community
has seemed to some so all-encompassing as not to allow
adequately for individual conscience, private life, freedom
of religion, and political dissidence. Some liberals, in par-
ticular, have found the Rousseauian community stifling of
individual freedom.
A classical expression of *liberalism attempting to find
space for individual freedom in a broader community con-
text is to be found in John Stuart Mill. Mill combines nor-
mative ethics and factual inquiry in his political philosophy

and related work. His most frequently read work of
explicit political philosophy is probably On Liberty, in
which he attempts to distinguish when society has legit-
imate authority over the individual and when not. Mill
argues that a necessary condition of society’s controlling
the individual (through either governmental penalties or
the coercive influence of public opinion, which has its own
penalties) should be that such control is needed to prevent
one individual from harming another or others. This is
often called ‘the harm principle’. Mill acknowledges some
exceptions in applying this doctrine, which only applies to
those in ‘the maturity of their faculties’ (a notion which
seems to exclude not only the young, but also, alarmingly,
those societies in which ‘the race itself may be considered
as in its nonage’). One justification for social control which
is mostly ruled out by Mill under normal circumstances is
what others often call *‘paternalism’, control of a person
for that person’s own good. For society to proceed with
the exercise of control, prevention of harm is not sufficient
but there must also be violation by one individual of
another’s right, or violation of an obligation of the first to
the second. On Liberty also includes a defence of liberty of
thought and discussion, a plea for individuality, a rejection
of religious authority in political matters, and discussion of
many specific applications of Mill’s views, in which Mill’s
anti-statism emerges. The ultimate moral basis here, as in
all of Mill, is the *greatest happiness principle or principle
of utility, most clearly defined and defended in Utilitarian-
ism. On Mill’s version of the principle, quality as well as
quantity of pleasure counts morally, a doctrine that has

interesting and probably élitist political implications.
Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government deserves
close study in conjunction with his other major works. In
it, Mill defends the importance of some popular participa-
tion in government, but also argues that society needs to
choose exceptional political representatives of superior
intelligence and morality, and then allow them to choose
what is best, voting them out if necessary. Mill’s fears
about the tyranny of the majority, so evident in On Liberty,
also show up in Considerations in other ways, for example
in his argument for special voting procedures to allow for
the representation of minorities, and in his argument that
extra votes ought to be given to those of superior intelli-
gence. It should be added that Mill appears in other works
to have become more sympathetic to socialism in his later
years, although the exact nature of his commitments is
somewhat controversial. Whether compatible with
732 political philosophy, history of
*socialism or not, Mill’s emphasis on individual *liberty is
only possible in the context of a broader community struc-
ture and set of traditions, however open to change Mill
wants these to be. Some critics claim that liberal *individu-
alism (with its commitments to such institutions as the
*market) tends to subvert community, but there is also a
sense of community in which the liberal individualist
(such as Mill) is simply offering still another sort of account
(to be evaluated on its merits) of the properly functioning
community.
Marx and Engels give a very different, historically
dynamic account of society, critical of liberal individual-

ism among other rival visions of community. An adequate
understanding of Marx requires some acquaintance with
Hegel, but we shall not comment on Hegel here except to
note that Marx thought of his own work as standing Hegel
upon his head. By this, Marx seems to have meant that the
Hegelian interpretation of history as primarily a study of
leading ideas and their dialectical changes, which explain
other institutional changes, needed to be radically revised.
For Marx, *historical materialism distinguishes between
economic base or infrastructure and superstructure,
including non-economic institutions and ideological
aspects of the society. Historical materialism depicts
changes in the former as, for the most part, the causes of
changes in superstructure, including ideological *super-
structure. Marx and Engels argue that after the ancient
world and feudalism, the economic structures of capital-
ism, including its two main antagonistic classes, the bour-
geoisie and the proletariat, have come to the fore in world
history. Class conflict is a main characteristic of all history,
but conflicts between owners of the means of production
and wage-earners within the capitalist system are seen as
central in this period. Sharpening class conflict and accom-
panying contradictions will eventually force a coming to
consciousness of class analysis, and eventually (first, they
predict, in the more advanced countries) a revolution in
which *capitalism is overthrown. They argue that capital-
ism is a global system which will exhaust all possibilities by
its own logic before falling, a view later elaborated by
Lenin. During the transitional ‘dictatorship of the prole-
tariat’, it is to be expected that there will be greater cen-

tralization of economic and political power in the state,
but eventually a ‘withering away of the state’ is to be
expected (Engels’s phrase). These changes are meant to
occur in some sense in accordance with historical–eco-
nomic laws, though the exact nature and status of such
laws is a matter of dispute. Marx and Engels want to com-
bine description and prediction in various ways that gen-
erate interpretative puzzles, but that are a consequence of
the desire both to avoid utopianism and to stay consistent
with leading historical trends, but also to contribute
actively to historical change that the authors consider
desirable. Marx and Engels do not necessarily rule out
normative ethical and political theory, but given their his-
torical materialism, the study of history and economics
generally seems to them more important. It has been left
to some subsequent Marxists (including some of the Praxis
group from what was formerly Yugoslavia) to stress the
importance of what Marx and Engels did not entirely over-
look, but de-emphasized. Arguably Marx and Engels have a
concept of collective autonomy or self-determination
which requires for its realization as freedom growth in
understanding of historical laws and an ending of the
exploitation and domination of some classes by others.
In the twentieth century a plethora of political and intel-
lectual developments shaped political philosophy. For a
long time, after the Russian Revolution and before recent
changes, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the
main political positions thought by many to be in con-
tention were one or another variety of liberalism (includ-
ing under this broad category the sort of *‘conservativism’

which argues for a limited state, ‘free markets’, private
property, and certain other traditional values) and Marx-
ism. This sort of opposition was always over-simplified.
Two counter-examples can be mentioned. In the USA
John Dewey’s avowedly democratic pragmatism was
indebted both to Hegelianism and at times even to aspects
of Marxism, but also preserved many features of the legacy
of liberalism. Dewey’s respect for scientific method,
although tempered in later years, was combined with an
interest in normative ‘democratically’ orientated thought
of a non-utopian variety. Dewey asserted the importance
of a critique of capitalist economic relations even as he
tended to remain critical of Marxism. The concept of
democratic community, used in a eulogistic way, is very
prominent in Dewey. Within the quite distinct, broad and
diverse tradition of anarchism, there had developed (over
a long period, but especially from William Godwin and
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on) a critique of centralized state
power along with a critique of capitalism. Anarcho-
syndicalism is a notable example. In more recent academic
philosophy in the English-speaking world, these bodies of
work have had some but rather limited influence. Recent
academic political philosophy in English has been mostly a
quarrel among liberalisms (well exemplified by the con-
trast between John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, with its two
principles of justice constructed by an autonomous choice
by rational beings in the ‘original position’ behind a ‘veil of
ignorance’, and Robert Nozick’s ‘conservative’ (old-
liberal), rights-centred (though selectively so), pro-capitalist,
minimal-state Anarchy, State, and Utopia) the practical rele-

vance of which may have been diminished by recent eco-
nomic and political changes. Since the widely proclaimed
‘end of the Cold War’ between capitalism and *commu-
nism, with the collapse of Soviet communism and a
decline in living-standards in parts of the capitalist world,
including some dependent regions, both Marxism and
militant free-market capitalism have come to seem to
some observers (rightly or wrongly) no longer as straight-
forwardly relevant as was once the case. Also, in recent
political philosophy, *‘communitarianism’ has come to be
a label applied to a variety of views stressing ideas about
community and critical of individualist liberalism. Com-
munitarians (including Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel,
Alasdair MacIntyre, and perhaps Michael Walzer) are
political philosophy, history of 733
sometimes critical of liberalism, but sometimes are them-
selves types of liberals.
There may perhaps at other times have been a more
assured consensus on which great authors should be
included in the canon of ‘Western’ political philosophy,
and less suspicion of the very idea of a canon. Feminists,
certain minorities in the ‘developed world’, and persons
from the ‘underdeveloped world’, among others, have
made a compelling case for reassessment of the traditional
canon. Then, too, the growth of descriptive and explan-
atory studies relevant to political philosophy (not a sudden
development, but a tendency with a long history of its
own) as well as normative work in other disciplines has
complicated study of the history of political philosophy.
Subjects such as political science, anthropology, soci-

ology, history, jurisprudence, literary studies, and the like
sometimes generate work which deserves inclusion in the
category of political philosophy. Some of the most inter-
esting discussions in political philosophy over the last few
decades in the English-speaking world, for example, have
involved philosophers who are also legal scholars (say,
H. L. A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and propo-
nents of critical legal studies such as Roberto Unger).
The idea of autonomy (requiring for its intelligibility
some value-laden picture of a community with its main
constitutive institutions) has been central in much import-
ant Western political philosophy, especially for modernity.
Autonomy has been considered a crucial part of human
welfare, a focus for describing favoured political institu-
tions such as democratic government, and a notion useful
in supporting other notions such as political obligation,
rights, justice, and the like. Whether the idea of autonomy
should survive critique (especially critique from the
descriptive-explanatory side of the subject) remains to be
seen, but the idea’s defeat would require a radical shift in
political perspective. Isaiah Berlin distinguishes negative
and positive freedom in politics and opts to support the
former as a primary value. (For Benjamin Constant in the
nineteenth century, similarly, the liberties of the ancients
and the moderns are fundamentally different, and the
ancient emphasis on political participation and public life is
no longer appropriate in the modern world.) For Berlin,
positive freedom (often denominated autonomy) is recog-
nizable in many great philosophers, including Plato,
Rousseau, and Marx, but allegedly easily leads to totalitar-

ian excesses. Arguably, Berlin’s view is exaggerated, and
has been effectively criticized by Charles Taylor in his
paper ‘What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty’. This family
of concepts of freedom as autonomy, combined with an
institutionally detailed account of community, still has an
important potential use for any political philosophy critical
of arbitrary political and economic power. e.t.s.
*equality; inequality; republicanism; socialism.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), in Four Essays on
Liberty (Oxford, 1969).
D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds.), Political Thinkers: From Socrates to
the Present (Oxford, 2003).
Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with
that of the Moderns’ (1820), in Benjamin Constant: Political
Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1984).
D. D. Raphael, Concepts of Justice (Oxford, 2001).
George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd edn. (New York,
1961).
political philosophy, problems of. Political philosophy
in Western civilization began as the philosophy of the
ancient Greek polis (the Greek word from which ‘political’
is derived). Accordingly, political philosophy in its incep-
tion took as its subject how best to govern and to live in a
city-state of that day. Its goal was the creation and preser-
vation of an ideal society. Although Plato devoted several
dialogues to issues of political philosophy, it is his Republic
(c.380 bc) that is arguably the most memorable, widely
read, and pioneering contribution to the subject. Apart

from the question of its actual influence on statecraft, it
provided both theorists and practitioners with a model of
a political philosophy in which the author undertook to
identify a range of problems concerning governance and
social order, and then tried to ground their solution on
appropriate metaphysical, epistemological, and anthro-
pological principles. These solutions in their turn raised
questions of educational philosophy, both moral and
cognitive, because in the absence of the right sort of
educational regimen there is (or so Plato argued) no hope
of at least creating (let alone preserving) the ideal society
that was the intended purpose or aim of political
philosophy.
In the centuries after Plato, the problems of political
philosophy ceased to focus on the governance of face-to-
face societies on the scale of the ancient city-state. Today,
especially, it is much larger political units, typically nation-
states (with their increasingly global scope) that are the
political entities whose structure is under discussion.
What might be called the apparent Platonic prejudice in
favour of identifying the ideal, possibly even an ideal
beyond reach, has been generally subordinated by polit-
ical philosophers to what might be called the Kantian
prejudice in favour of exploring the presuppositions of the
actual as well as the ideal political possibilities.
From this perspective, and despite the importance of
the Republic, it is Aristotle rather than Plato who provided
philosophy with its first genuine political treatise. In his
Politics (c.330 bc) Aristotle made no attempt to imitate his
teacher’s style of presentation, which was to use imagin-

ary dialogues between Socrates and his companions to
sketch a portrait of the ideal society, its origin, and the
obstacles to its preservation. Instead, Aristotle’s treatise
concentrates on stating, defending, and applying the prin-
ciples that governments actually as well as ideally rely on.
Yet it was not only in style that Aristotle deviated from
Plato. On the most fundamental question—what is the
nature and structure of the ideal society—they differed
radically. Plato argued in the Republic that there is exactly
one form of ideal state, its class structure is based on the
734 political philosophy, history of
fixed differential capacities of its citizenry, rigidly orches-
trated so that each class of persons performs the tasks for
which the natural talents of its members best fits them.
Aristotle in his Politics is far more tolerant of diverse forms
of government and social structure. He saw advantages
under the right conditions for allocating governing
authority in any of three main ways: monarchy, aristoc-
racy, and ‘polity’. (The latter is roughly what we would
call constitutional democracy. Plato in the Republic
insisted on rule by philosopher-kings.)
The problems of political philosophy (in the material
mode) that have preoccupied thinkers for the past several
centuries are essentially the questions (in the formal
mode) concerning political life and institutions. These are
what the authors of the great treatises in political philoso-
phy since the Reformation and Renaissance have endeav-
oured to answer, plus an array of issues and questions to
which those answers in their turn have given rise. Thus to
identify these problems and some of the major proposed

solutions to them, one must quarry in works as diverse as
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), John Locke’s Second
Treatise (1690), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract
(1762), William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice (1793), G. F. W. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1830),
J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859), T. H. Green’s Lectures on the
Principles of Political Obligation (1895), Friedrich Hayek’s
Constitution of Liberty (1960), John Rawls’s Theory of Justice
(1972), and Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative
Action (1984, 1987). This is to name but a representative
few of the best-known. The problems of political philoso-
phy that these philosophers undertake to solve would
appear to be divisible, at least provisionally, into three dis-
tinct sets differentiated from each other in various ways
and subject to solution by different methods. Given the
range and complexity of matters that can legitimately be
considered relevant to the goals of political philosophy, it
is hardly surprising that a vast library exists of attempts to
deal with those problems in both abstract theoretical and
relatively practical terms.
First and foremost, there are problems of political phil-
osophy that are essentially conceptual. Thus, Plato opens
book 1 of the Republic by asking, What is justice?, and Aris-
totle opens book 3 of the Politics by asking, What is a state?
Political philosophies will differ from one another as they
vary in their starting places, as they provide different con-
ceptions of certain central ideas, and as they allot greater
or lesser centrality to the values represented by a given
concept in their theory. These concepts play a double role:
first, they are proper topics of philosophical inquiry in

their own right; second, they serve as the building-blocks
of any possible political theory. Although there is no
canonical set of such concepts, virtually every compre-
hensive political philosophy will find it necessary to
explain, in order to use effectively, many if not all of the
following three dozen concepts: *authority, *autonomy,
*citizenship, *coercion, *collective responsibility, *com-
munity, *consent, *desert, devolution, *duty, *equality,
*fairness, *justice, *law, *liberty, *loyalty, majority rule,
*obligation, order, ownership, *power, *property, public
interest, *punishment, representation, *rights, slavery,
social class, *society, sovereignty, *State, *terrorism,
*toleration, *violence, welfare, *well-being. The variety
and complexity of these concepts, and the interconnections
among them, show that the problems of political philoso-
phy overlap, intersect, and merge with the problems of
legal, social, economic, ethical, and educational philoso-
phy. In so far as the task of political philosophy is thought
to be one primarily of analysis and clarification, concep-
tual questions will be regarded as fundamental.
Some philosophers have gone so far as virtually to iden-
tify the problems of political philosophy with all and only
the problems that can be settled by conceptual analysis.
Notable examples can be found in T. D. Weldon’s Vocabu-
lary of Politics (1953), Anthony Quinton’s Political Philoso-
phy (1967), and Felix E. Oppenheim’s Political Concepts: A
Reconstruction (1981). The self-denying approach manifest
in these volumes was mainly a product of the positivistic
and linguistic phases of general philosophy in the mid-
twentieth century, when all philosophical problems were

held to be ‘conceptual’, and the only method of philo-
sophical discussion was ‘analytic’. By the end of the cen-
tury this approach had few if any adherents. There is no
doubt that conceptual questions are central to any pos-
sible political philosophy, as they are (or at least have
been) to the nature of philosophical problems generally.
But as politics itself is a matter of eminently practical
importance, its philosophical problems must reflect this
fact. The discussion of nothing but conceptual ques-
tions—even questions about political concepts—cannot
suffice for the task.
This brings us to the second category of problems, the
normative, in which a philosopher undertakes to state and
defend substantive principles that can serve to answer
normative questions. Among them are these: What prin-
ciples ought to be adopted and enforced such that compli-
ance with them will achieve social justice? What principles
are used and presupposed in defending a given political
practice or institution? Just as there is no established canon
of the conceptual issues in political philosophy, so there is
no fixed set of normative principles in the workshop of
political philosophy. Yet some questions are so central and
typical that they arise again and again across the centuries
for anyone who reflects on social order and disorder and
the lessons they teach about human frailty and aspir-
ations. A partial list looks like this: What is the proper
scope and role of law in providing conditions for social
stability? What forms of coercion to secure compliance
with just laws are permissible? Under what conditions, if
any, may the citizen violate the law and even forcibly resist

its enforcement? What conditions must be satisfied if non-
violent resistance to lawful orders are to be justified? Is there
any legitimate role for violence against persons or property
in a constitutional democracy? Can political terrorism be
justified, at least as a last resort? What rights, if any, apart
from those provided by the laws of the land, do individuals
or groups have? What obligations do individuals have to
political philosophy, problems of 735
obey the laws and governments set over them, and what is
the source of these obligations? How can political author-
ity best be reconciled with individual autonomy? To what
extent ought individuals to be left free to bargain with
others in acquiring and transferring property, including
even property in their own bodies and lives? How should
conflicts between social utility (efficiency) and distribu-
tive justice (equity) be resolved? Under what conditions, if
any, should claims based on the equal worth of all persons
prevail over considerations of efficiency? Is a strict merit-
ocracy a threat to equality? How free are persons when
the options among which they must choose are not all of
their own making? What normative principles in general
ought to be seen as presupposed by preferred political
practices and policies, and how are these principles to be
justified? Again, in this more practical arena there are
many questions that political philosophy needs to deal
with.
Standard political philosophies or ideologies, such as
anarchism, fascism, totalitarianism, socialism, commu-
nism, liberalism (whether in its contractarian, utilitarian,
or libertarian versions), and communitarianism are con-

stituted by their different answers to these and related
questions. In so far as the task of political philosophy is
thought to involve justifying a set of political institutions
of one sort rather than of another—or, at a minimum,
evaluating them—it is the answers to these normative
questions that form the core of political philosophy. But
how philosophers ought to answer the normative ques-
tions of political philosophy admits of no simple answer.
This question is itself one of the perennial higher-order
problems of political philosophy.
In addition to conceptual and normative problems, sys-
tematic and comprehensive political thinking also
involves various empirical problems. By way of illustra-
tion, consider these questions: Which institutions and
practices are appropriate to implement the principles of
distributive justice? How can the self-interest of governors
and other officials be harnessed to serve the interest of the
general public? What constitutional mechanisms will pro-
vide effective checks on executive power without causing
governmental paralysis? Does equality of opportunity
require inequality of liberty? Which forms of punish-
ment—corporal, incarcerative, pecuniary, etc.—provide
the most effective deterrence to crime? What constraints
do the best political principles impose on the recourse to
punishment? Is a capitalist economy causally related to
liberal-democratic political institutions? How plastic is
human nature?
In raising questions such as these—questions that are at
least in part answerable only by empirical inquiry and data
from history and the social sciences—we not only

approach but actually cross the boundary that divides
political philosophy from political science. (We might
think of political theory as a third point, along with polit-
ical science and political philosophy, the three of which tri-
angulate a space subdivided by somewhat vague and
elastic boundaries.) Although every classic political
philosophy contains views on some empirical questions
(they are prominent in Aristotle, rarer in Plato), most
philosophers today would argue that to the extent that
such questions can be answered only by experiential data,
systematic observation, the investigation of practices,
statistical methods, and the answers then devoted to
describing, predicting, or explaining individual or group
behaviour, to precisely that extent the questions are not
philosophical at all. For practical political purposes it is
constantly necessary to ask and answer such questions,
but philosophy has little or nothing to contribute to the
answers.
Such a convenient and familiar sorting of the problems
of political philosophy into conceptual, normative, and
empirical categories, however, eventually runs afoul of
two difficulties. The lesser is that as the boundaries
between concepts, norms, and empirical generalizations
are themselves somewhat blurred and uncertain, particu-
lar cases will arise—often these are among the most inter-
esting cases—where the attempt to keep the problems and
their methods of solution precise and distinct from each
other will fail. Consider a question such as this, brought to
prominence in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice: Would a
rational and self-interested person situated behind a veil of

ignorance choose some version of the principle of utility
as the fundamental principle for the society in which he
expects to live? Is this question primarily conceptual or
normative? or is it partly empirical? or perhaps a mixture
of two or even all three of these?
The graver difficulty arises from (in the phrase of W. B.
Gallie) the ‘essentially contested’ nature of political con-
cepts. Their analysis and interpretation typically is shaped
by implicit practical concerns. Or, to put the point another
way, the central political concepts are not—and so cannot
be used as if they were—merely descriptive and unblem-
ished by the ideological concerns of the philosopher who
employs them. As a result, what may begin by seeming to
be the wholly neutral task of defining or analysing a polit-
ical concept will probably end by merging subtly (and per-
haps tacitly) with normative considerations. Thus, the
image—(and for some, the ideal)—of unbiased, ideologic-
ally neutral answers to the problems of political philoso-
phy is likely to be elusive at best. It is considerations of this
sort that are the first step toward a post-modernist
perspective on political theory.
Cutting orthogonally across the distinctions among the
conceptual, the normative, and the empirical problems of
political philosophy is the contrast between pure and
applied philosophy and the issues properly belonging to
each. For every great treatise in political philosophy, from
Hobbes to Rawls, in which conceptual and normative
problems in their pure form are addressed to the relative
exclusion of empirical and applied issues, there are as
many and more essays and books by thinkers hardly less

eminent that focus on making first-order political judge-
ments, evaluating the prevailing political order, and
proposing revisionary (even revolutionary) practices and
policies—as evidenced by such classic tracts as Thoman
736 political philosophy, problems of
Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2), Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848), J. S. Mill’s The Subjec-
tion of Women(1862), Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence
(1906), and R. H. Tawney’s Equality (1931). More recent
works written in this vein include F. A. Hayek’s Road to
Serfdom (1944), Karl Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies
(1945), Jean-Paul Sartre’s On Genocide (1968), Peter
Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), Michel Foucault’s Discip-
line and Punish (1975), Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust
Wars (1975), Onora O’Neill’s Faces of Hunger (1986),
Amartya Sen’s Inequality Reexamined (1992), and Ted Hon-
derich’s After the Terror (2002). In books such as these,
philosophers have displayed their interest in evaluating
and criticizing substantive political, social, and economic
practices and institutions, and they have done so by relying
on and invoking principles and ideals not themselves the
primary focus of the author’s argumentative or analytic
attention. The problems thus addressed are more plaus-
ibly viewed, many would argue, as mainly or wholly polit-
ical rather than philosophical. Yet it would be a mistake to
press this distinction too hard; to do so would be to ignore
some of the most interesting and influential contributions
philosophers have made to some of the problems that fall
on the boundary between political advocacy and applied
political philosophy.

As the history of political philosophy shows, what inter-
ests philosophers is shaped in part by the great issues of the
day. These typically provide the fuel not only for political
organization and agitation but for political reflection as
well. And as these issues change over tine, with the chang-
ing material circumstances of life, so do the paramount
problems of political philosophy.
Thus, ancient writers were concerned to explain how
the state emerged from family and tribal units, a problem
that political philosophers today are happy to leave to cul-
tural and historical anthropology. Late medieval and early
modern philosophers focused on the proper division of
authority between church and state, the sacred and the
secular, another set of issues largely ignored by philoso-
phers in recent decades (though there is some possibility
that they may return to the agenda because of the
increased number of sectarian fundamentalist religious
movements world-wide). The explorations, conquests,
and colonizations by Europeans of African, Indian, Ameri-
can, and Asian peoples four centuries ago provoked
philosophers to reflect on the nature of property, free-
dom, and rights as these issues became focused in the twin
practices of enslaving native peoples and colonizing their
territories. With the struggle to promote liberal demo-
cratic ideas in Western Europe since the Protestant Reform-
ation, problems of political equality versus inequality, of
tradition and stability versus liberation and progressive
change, or collective versus centralized political decision-
making, and of individual autonomy versus communal
solidarity came to dominate the concerns of political phil-

osophy just as they dominated political debate and polit-
ical struggle during the same period. The Industrial
Revolution, factory labour, and imperialism of the nine-
teenth century forced new sets of problems and new ways
of conceptualizing human relations on to the agenda of
political philosophy. Such vexed matters as racism, sex-
ism, ageism, human population growth, maldistribution
of the world’s material resources, and the unremitting
assault on the natural environment, are all issues that
bedevil governments and provoke partisan disagreement
and, accordingly, have begun to find a place on the agenda
of political philosophy as well. h.a.b.
*morality in political philosophy; social philosophy.
Brian Barry, Political Argument (London, 1965).
S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters, The Principles of Political Thought (New
York, 1965).
Adam Finlayson (ed.), Contemporary Political Thought: A Reader
and Guide (Edinburgh, 2003).
Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), A Companion to Contem-
porary Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1993).
Virginia Held, Kai Nielsen, and Charles Parsons (eds.), Philosophy
and Political Action (Oxford, 1972).
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1990).
Peter Laslett et al. (eds.), Philosophy, Politics, and Society (Oxford,
1956– ).
Nomos (New York, 1958– ), various eds., yearbook of the Ameri-
can Society of Political and Legal Philosophy.
Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff (eds.), Political Thought
(Oxford, 1999).
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, Ill., 1959).

political scepticism. V. S. Naipaul observed that in the
late twentieth century the opium of the people was not
religion but politics. Naipaul is certainly expressing a
widespread and justifiable suspicion after high hopes had
been raised about just what politicians and politics can
achieve, but this need not amount to political scepticism
in any systematic sense. Such scepticism derives from two
sources. First, there is the sociological observation,
enshrined in public choice theory, that bureaucrats and
politicians tend to serve themselves and the interest of
their bureaucracies before those of their clients. This
would explain recent phenomenal increases of state
power, even where governments are ostensibly commit-
ted to reducing it. Then, secondly, there are doubts, par-
ticularly associated with Hayek and Oakeshott, about
whether centrally planned political attempts to achieve
results are ever well directed or based on enough inform-
ation to make them truly rational. The moral of both
these points would seem to be to reduce government as
much and as quickly as possible, but with the paradoxical
proviso that in most countries it would need a massive
political initiative to do so. a.o’h.
*conservatism.
John Gray, Limited Government (London, 1989).
political violence: see violence, political.
politics and determinism. Setting aside the special cases
of economic and historical determinism, the clearest con-
sequences of *determinism in politics are for a cluster of
ideas about punishment and reward, in which the concept
politics and determinism 737

of *desert is central. Conservative advocates of tougher
sentencing are apt to stress the mischievousness and evil
of criminals, just as they discount the circumstances and
aetiology of criminal behaviour. Tougher punishment,
they argue, is what evil men and women deserve. Philoso-
phers disagree about the implications of determinism for
responsibility and punishment (*compatibilism and
incompatibilism), but there is at least one understanding
of desert that takes it to follow from actions that are
wholly within the power of the agent, and which is there-
fore incompatible with determinism. Indeterminism is
thus a natural accompaniment to beliefs that some crim-
inals are evil out of their own choosing and deserve to be
punished for it.
The argument about the compatibility of determinism
with responsibility and punishment can be viewed, there-
fore, as a theoretical counterpart to the political debate
about how much weight should be given to social depriv-
ation in combating crime.
The idea that unequal possession of wealth is more or
less deserved is also a recognizable (though not universal)
feature of conservative thought. It is argued that since left-
wing thought about distribution can be said to be founded
on a principle of equality rather than desert, *conser-
vatism, by contrast, is especially vulnerable to determin-
ism. Desert is less fundamental to conservative thinking
about distribution, however, than it is to conservative
ideas about crime and punishment: conservatives will
more readily acknowledge the role of circumstance and
luck in the distribution of property than in the causes of

crime. k.m.
*historical determinism.
D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1975), iii. ii.
K. Joseph and J. Sumption, Equality (London, 1979).
T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (Oxford, 1988).
politics and the philosophers. Before the professional-
ization of the universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, political service of one kind or another was the
main alternative to the Church as a source of steady
income for a good many philosophers. As a result, many
have had cause to dabble in politics. From ancient times
onwards, however, philosophers have debated whether
they should seek to guide their political masters according
to their philosophical ideals or whether instead they
should adapt their skills to the political requirements of
the moment. Plato offered the model for the first view,
and attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Dionysius I and
his successor Dionysius II of Syracuse in Sicily to adopt a
code of laws modelled on his political ideas. *Enlighten-
ment thinkers also followed this approach, hoping to turn
the monarchs of their time into philosopher-kings.
Voltaire briefly sought to serve Frederick the Great in this
capacity, for example, and Diderot was taken up by
Catherine the Great. Bentham’s numerous attempts to
get governments to take up his various constitutional
schemes and reforms, such as his proposal for an ideal
prison based on his Panopticon design, also fits into this
line of thinking. In the twentieth century Gentile believed
he had persuaded Mussolini that Fascism was the embod-

iment of his actualist philosophy, whilst Heidegger tried
with rather less success to make similar claims about
Nazism, and Lukács and Sartre even more disastrously
about Stalinism. However, all these philosophers gener-
ally discovered that even when politicians invite their
advice they rarely take it, or only do so for as long as it
proves convenient, leaving the philosopher looking polit-
ically naïve.
Machiavelli offers the model for the second view.
Superficially this tack seems less honourable, requiring
the philosopher to adapt his or her ideals to the prevailing
political wind. However, as we have seen, it has generally
been the first view that has involved philosophers in being
the dupes of tyrants, whereas the second has proved both
more democratic and more successful. Locke, for example,
acted as medical adviser and ideologist in residence for
the Earl of Shaftesbury, and although the initial failure of
his patron’s political activities briefly forced him into exile,
his services to the Whig cause were ultimately rewarded
with a number of government offices. Tom Paine was per-
haps the democratic philosopher par excellence, contribut-
ing theoretical support to both the American and the
French Revolutions, and causing the British government
to prosecute and outlaw him for seditious libel in the
process. Modern examples include the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci, whose philosophy was intimately con-
nected to his activity as one of the founders of the Italian
Communist Party, and Bertrand Russell, who played a
major role in the pacifist movement during the First
World War and was one of the leading lights of the Cam-

paign for Nuclear Disarmament during the 1950s.
In general, however, philosophers have found them-
selves wavering between these two positions. They have
been deeply ambivalent about politics and rarely success-
ful at it, perhaps because whilst compromise is a political
virtue it is rarely regarded as a philosophical one. Burke’s
end-of-poll address to the voters of Bristol, in which he
stressed that the duty of the MP was representation rather
than delegation, epitomizes the resulting ambivalence of
philosophers towards politics. Unsurprisingly, the elect-
orate rejected him at the next election, and he sat for the
rest of his parliamentary career for a rotten borough in the
gift of his patron, Lord Rockingham. J. S. Mill’s parliamen-
tary career was not dissimilar. MP for Westminster from
1865 to 1868, he confined his electioneering to telling his
electorate that it was unnecessary for him to consult them
directly since he undoubtedly knew their own interests
better than they themselves. In recent times John Hospers
is one of the few philosophers to enter the electoral
lists, standing in 1972 as the first Presidential candidate
for the Libertarian Party in the United States—he polled
5,000 votes. r.p.b.
M. Cranston, Philosophers and Pamphleteers (Oxford, 1986).
J. Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics (New Haven, Conn., 1965).
M. Walzer, The Company of Critics (London, 1989).
738 politics and determinism
Pomponazzi, Pietro (1462–1525). Italian Aristotelian
philosopher who provoked a controversy in 1516 with his
treatise De Immortalitate Animae. Defying a decree of the
Fifth Lateran Council (1513) which enjoined philosophers

to teach that the personal immortality of the soul was
demonstrable on rational grounds, he maintained that
neither Aristotelian philosophy nor reason provided
support for Christian dogma. He claimed to accept the
authority of the Church as a matter of faith, but refused to
allow such considerations to influence his judgement in
the realm of philosophy, whose autonomy he staunchly
defended. Despite attempts to convict him of heresy, he
was able to hold on to his chair at the University of Bologna.
Fearing another uproar, he forbore to publish a treatise in
which he explained miracles in terms of astrological influ-
ences and other forms of occult causation. j.a.k.
M. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Italian Renais-
sance (Padua, 1986).
pons asinorum
(Latin: asses’ bridge). Proof given of the-
orem 5 in book 1 of Euclid’s Elements (concerning the
angles of isosceles triangles): inability to follow the proof is
supposed to demonstrate stupidity. In medieval times
the theorem was described as elefuga, the flight of the
miserable (from geometry). The term is sometimes
applied to Pythagoras’ theorem, sometimes to a medieval
logic teaching aid, and sometimes to any argument sup-
posed to separate intellectual sheep from goats. m.c.
Popper, Karl (1902–94). British (originally Austrian)
philosopher, whose considerable reputation rests on his
philosophy of science and his political philosophy. In his
early work he was associated with the positivists of the
*Vienna Circle, and shared their interest in distinguishing
between science and other activities. However, Popper

did not think that it was possible to approach that (or any
other philosophical problem) by an analysis of language or
meaning, nor did he see the success of science in terms of
its being more verifiable than, say, ethics or metaphysics.
For Popper always took a sceptical Humean stand on
*induction, as a result of which he claimed it is impossible
to verify or even to confirm a universal scientific theory
with any positive degree of probability. What we can do,
though, is to disprove a universal theory. While no
number of observations in conformity with the hypo-
thesis that, say, all planets have elliptical orbits can show
that the hypothesis is true or even that tomorrow’s planet
will have an elliptical orbit, only one observation of a
non-elliptical planetary orbit will refute the hypothesis.
Falsification can get a grip where positive proof is ever
beyond us; the demarcation between science and non-
science lies in the manner in which scientific theories
make testable predictions and are given up when they fail
their tests.
Popper, in contrast to the Logical Positivists, never held
that non-scientific activities were meaningless or even
intellectually disreputable. What is disreputable is
*pseudo-science, which arises when holders of an
empirical theory refuse to be deflected by observational
disproof or where a supposedly scientific theory never
makes any empirical predictions. Popper convicts Marx-
ists of the first sin and psychoanalysts of the second, con-
trasting them with a true scientist like Einstein.
Questions, though, remain. Is it true that scientists
always reject their theories when faced with counter-

evidence, as Popper says they should? And if the most we
can ever do in science is to disprove theories, how do we
know which theories to believe and act on? Popper
says that we ought to act on those theories which have
survived severe testing. His critics, though, find this hard
to distinguish from the induction he officially rejects.
The themes of human ignorance and the need for crit-
ical scrutiny of ideas are also prominent in Popper’s polit-
ical philosophy. This is an advocacy of so-called open
societies against the pretensions of planners and polit-
icians who claim the right to impose their blueprints on the
rest of us by virtue of supposed knowledge of the course of
history. There can be no such knowledge. History is
affected by discoveries we will make in the future, and do
not know now. Moreover, any policy, however well-
intentioned, has unforeseeable and unintended conse-
quences. The only way to overcome our ignorance is to
allow those affected by policies to voice their criticisms
and for people in a society to be able peacefully and regu-
larly to change their rulers. This last right, rather than for-
mal democracy, is the mark of the open society, a concept
taken for granted in the western Europe, but of increasing
interest currently in eastern Europe and South America.
In his later years, Popper placed his theory of scientific
and political error-seeking within a generalized theory of
evolution. He also defended versions of scientific realism,
*indeterminism, and *dualism with commendable valour,
if not always with great subtlety of argument. a.o’h.
*hypothetics-deductive method; Logical Positivism;
London philosophy.

A. O’Hear, Karl Popper (London, 1980).
K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1959); tr. of
Logik der Forschung (Vienna, 1935).
—— The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. (London, 1945).
—— Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963).
—— Objective Knowledge (Oxford, 1972).
popular philosophy. There are three main kinds of popu-
lar philosophy: first, general guidance about the conduct
of life; secondly, amateur consideration of the standard,
technical problems of philosophy; thirdly, philosophical
popularization.
At the start some recognition should be given to a
movement explicitly called ‘popular philosophy’ in mid-
and late eighteenth-century Germany. Its leader was
Moses Mendelssohn, and it set itself against obscure tech-
nicalities and systematic elaboration, in the interests of
closeness to experience and usefulness for life. The acqui-
sition of imperial authority by Kant soon put an end to this
project, and installed a style of German philosophy from
which even Christian Wolff would have shrunk.
popular philosophy 739