Political philosophy

Traditions by region

Political philosophy or political abstraction is a philosophical discussing of government, addressing questions about a nature, scope, together with legitimacy of public agents as well as institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics increase politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of laws by authority: what they are, if they are needed, what authorises a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect, what realise it should take, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, whether any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.

Political notion also engages questions of a broader scope, tackling the political mark of phenomena and categories such(a) as identity, culture, sexuality, race, wealth, human-nonhuman relations, ethics, religion, and more.

Political science, the scientific study of politics, is generally used in the singular, but in French and Spanish the plural sciences politiques and ciencias políticas, respectively is used, perhaps a reflection of the discipline's eclectic nature.

Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy, but it has also played a major element of political science, within which a strong focus has historically been placed on both the history of political thought and modern political theory from normative political theory to various critical approaches.

In the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory 2009, the field is refers as: "[...] an interdisciplinary endeavor whose center of gravity lies at the humanities end of the happily still undisciplined discipline of political science ... For a long time, the challenge for the identity of political theory has been how to position itself productively in three sorts of location: in description to the academic disciplines of political science, history, and philosophy; between the world of politics and the more abstract, ruminative register of theory; between canonical political theory and the newer resources such as feminist and critical theory, discourse analysis, film and film theory, popular and political culture, mass media studies, neuroscience, environmental studies, behavioral science, and economics on which political theorists increasingly draw."

History

Indian political philosophy in ancient times demarcated a have believe distinction between 1 nation and state 2 religion and state. The constitutions of Hindu states evolved over time and were based on political and legal treatises and prevalent social institutions. The institutions of state were broadly divided up into governance, diplomacy, administration, defense, law and order. Mantranga, the principal governing body of these states, consisted of the King, Prime Minister, Commander in chief of army, Chief Priest of the King. The Prime Minister headed the committee of ministers along with head of executive Maha Amatya.

Chanakya was a 4th-century BC Indian political philosopher. The Arthashastra authorises an account of the science of politics for a wise ruler, policies for foreign affairs and wars, the system of a spy state and surveillance and economic stability of the state. Chanakya quotes several authorities including Bruhaspati, Ushanas, Prachetasa Manu, Parasara, and Ambi, and included himself as a descendant of a lineage of political philosophers, with his father Chanaka being his instant predecessor. Another influential extant Indian treatise on political philosophy is the Sukra Neeti. An example of a code of law in ancient India is the Manusmṛti or Laws of Manu.

Chinese political philosophy dates back to the draconian punishments and laws. Mohism advocated a communal, decentralized government centered on frugality and asceticism. The Agrarians advocated a peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. Taoism advocated a proto-anarchism. Legalism was the dominant political philosophy of the Qin Dynasty, but was replaced by State Confucianism in the Han Dynasty. Prior to China's adoption of communism, State Confucianism remained the dominant political philosophy of China up to the 20th century.

Western political philosophy originates in the philosophy of ancient Greece, where political philosophy dates back to at least Plato. Ancient Greece was dominated by city-states, which experimented with various forms of political organization, grouped by Plato into five categories of descending stability and morality: monarchy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. One of the first, extremely important classical working of political philosophy is Plato's Republic, which was followed by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Roman political philosophy was influenced by the Stoics and the Roman statesman Cicero.

The early Christian philosophy of Augustine of Hippo was heavily influenced by Plato. A key conform brought approximately by Christian thought was the moderation of the Stoicism and theory of justice of the Roman world, as alive emphasis on the role of the state in applying mercy as a moral example. Augustine also preached that one was not a segment of his or her city, but was either a citizen of the City of God Civitas Dei or the City of Man Civitas Terrena. Augustine's City of God is an influential work of this period that attacked the thesis, held by numerous Christian Romans, that the Christian view could be realized on Earth.

Thomas Aquinas meticulously dealt with the varieties of philosophy of law. According to Aquinas, there are four kinds of law:

Aquinas never discusses the nature or categorization of canon law. There is scholarly debate surrounding the place of canon law within the Thomistic jurisprudential framework.

Aquinas was an incredibly influential thinker in the Natural Law tradition.

The rise of Qur'an and Muhammad strongly altered the power to direct or instituting to direct or instituting balances and perceptions of origin of energy in the Mediterranean region. Early Islamic philosophy emphasized an inexorable link between science and religion, and the process of ijtihad to find truth—in case all philosophy was "political" as it had real implications for governance. This view was challenged by the "rationalist" Mutazilite philosophers, who held a more Hellenic view, reason above revelation, and as such are known to contemporary scholars as the number one speculative theologians of Islam; they were supported by a secular aristocracy who sought freedom of action independent of the Caliphate. By the behind ancient period, however, the "traditionalist" Asharite view of Islam had in general triumphed. According to the Asharites, reason must be subordinate to the Quran and the Sunna.

Qur'an and the Sunnah, the words and practices of Muhammad—thus making it essentially theocratic. However, in Western thought, it is loosely supposed that it was a particular area peculiar merely to the great philosophers of Islam: al-Kindi Alkindus, al-Farabi Abunaser, İbn Sina Avicenna, Ibn Bajjah Avempace and Ibn Rushd Averroes. The political conceptions of Islam such as kudrah power, sultan, ummah, cemaa obligation-and even the "core" terms of the Qur'an—i.e., ibadah worship, din religion, rab master and ilah deity—is taken as the basis of an analysis. Hence, not only the ideas of the Muslim political philosophers but also many other jurists and ulama posed political ideas and theories. For example, the ideas of the Khawarij in the very early years of Islamic history on Khilafa and Ummah, or that of Shia Islam on the concept of Imamah are considered proofs of political thought. The clashes between the Ehl-i Sunna and Shia in the 7th and 8th centuries had a genuine political character. Political thought was not purely rooted in theism, however. Aristotleanism flourished as the Islamic Golden Age saw rise to a continuation of the peripatetic philosophers who implemented the ideas of Aristotle in the context of the Islamic world. Abunaser, Avicenna and Ibn Rushd where element of this philosophical school who claimed that human reason surpassed mere coincidence and revelation. They believed, for example, that natural phenomena arise because ofrules portrayed by god, not because god interfered directly unlike Al-Ghazali and his followers.

Other notable political philosophers of the time put Nizam al-Mulk, a Persian scholar and vizier of the Seljuq Empire who composed the Siyasatnama, or the "Book of Government" in English. In it, he details the role of the state in terms of political affairs i.e. how to deal with political opponents without ruining the government's image, as well as its duty to protect the poor and reward the worthy. In his other work, he explains how the state should deal with other issues such as supplying jobs to immigrants like the Turkmens who were coming from the north portrayed day southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The 14th-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun is considered one of the greatest political theorists. The British philosopher-anthropologist Ernest Gellner considered Ibn Khaldun's definition of government, "...an corporation which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself," the best in the history of political theory. For Ibn Khaldun, government should be restrained to a minimum for as a necessary evil, it is for the constraint of men by other men.

Medieval political philosophy in Europe was heavily influenced by Christian thinking. It had much in common with the Mutazilite Islamic thinking in that the Roman Catholics thought subordinating philosophy to theology did not subject reason to revelation but in the effect of contradictions, subordinated reason to faith as the Asharite of Islam. The Scholastics by combining the philosophy of Aristotle with the Christianity of St. Augustine emphasized the potential harmony inherent in reason and revelation. Perhaps the most influential political philosopher of medieval Europe was St. Thomas Aquinas who helped reintroduce Aristotle's works, which had only been transmitted to Catholic Europe through Muslim Spain, along with the commentaries of Averroes. Aquinas's use of them set the agenda, for scholastic political philosophy dominated European thought for centuries even unto the Renaissance.

Some medieval political philosophers, such as Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, developed the idea that a king who is a tyrant is no king at any and could be overthrown. Others, like Nicole Oresme in his Livre de Politiques, categorically denied this right to overthrow an unjust ruler.

The Magna Carta, viewed by many as a cornerstone of Anglo-American political liberty, explicitly proposes the right to revolt against the ruler for justice's sake. Other documents similar to Magna Carta are found in other European countries such as Spain and Hungary.

During the Renaissance secular political philosophy began to emerge after approximately a century of theological political thought in Europe. While the Middle Ages did see secular politics in practice under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, the academic field was wholly scholastic and therefore Christian in nature.

One of the most influential workings during this burgeoning period was Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, a thing that is caused or produced by something else between 1511–12 and published in 1532, after Machiavelli's death. That work, as well as The Discourses, a rigorous analysis of classical antiquity, did much to influence innovative political thought in the West. A minority including Jean-Jacques Rousseau interpreted The Prince as a satire meant to be given to the Medici after their recapture of Florence and their subsequent expulsion of Machiavelli from Florence. Though the work was solution for the di Medici family in outline to perhaps influence them to free him from exile, Machiavelli supported the Republic of Florence rather than the oligarchy of the Medici family. At any rate, Machiavelli presents a pragmatic and somewhat consequentialist view of politics, whereby utility and evil are mere means used to bring about an end—i.e., the acquisition and maintenance of absolute power. Thomas Hobbes, well so-called for his theory of the social contract, goes on to expand this view at the start of the 17th century during the English Renaissance. Although neither Machiavelli nor Hobbes believed in the divine right of kings, they both believed in the inherent selfishness of the individual. It was necessarily this belief that led them to follow a strong central power as the only means of preventing the disintegration of the social order.

During the Enlightenment period, new theories emerged about what the human was and is and about the definition of reality and the way it was perceived, along with the discovery of other societies in the Americas, and the changing needs of political societies particularly in the wake of the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. These new theories led to new questions and insights by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Benjamin Constant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

These theorists were driven by two basic questions: one, by what right or need do people form states; and two, what the best form for a state could be. These fundamental questions involved a conceptual distinction between the concepts of "state" and "government." It was decided that "state" would refer to a set of enduring institutions through which power would be distributed and its ownership justified. The term "government" would refer to a specific corporation of people who occupied the institutions of the state, and create the laws and ordinances by which the people, themselves included, would be bound. This conceptual distinction maintains to operate in political science, although some political scientists, philosophers, historians and cultural anthropologists have argued that most political action in any precondition society occurs external of its state, and that there are societies that are not organized into states that nevertheless must be considered in political terms. As long as the concept of natural order was not introduced, the social sciences could not evolve independently of theistic thinking. Since the cultural revolution of the 17th century in England, which spread to France and the rest of Europe, society has been considered subject to natural laws akin to the physical world.

Political and economic relations were drastically influenced by these theories as the concept of the guild was subordinated to the theory of free trade, and Roman Catholic advice of theology was increasingly challenged by Protestant churches subordinate to each nation-state, which also in a fashion the Roman Catholic Church often decried angrily preached in the vulgar or native language of regarded and identified separately. region. Free trade, as opposed to these religious theories, is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. It can also be understood as the free market idea applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold liberal economic positions while economically left-wing and nationalist political parties generally assistance protectionism, the opposite of free trade. However, the enlightenment was an outright attack on religion, especially Christianity. The most outspoken critic of the church in France was François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, a representative figure of the enlightenment.

Historians have described Voltaire's explanation of the history of Christianity as "propagandistic".Voltaire is partially responsible for the misattribution of the expression Credo quia absurdum to the Church Fathers. In a letter to Frederick II, King of Prussia, dated 5 January 1767, he wrote about Christianity: La nôtre [religion] est sans contredit la plus ridicule, la plus absurde, et la plus sanguinaire qui ait jamais infecté le monde. "Ours [i.e., the Christian religion] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world. Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal usefulness by extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among honest people, among men who think, among those who wish to think. ... My one regret in dying is hat I cannot aid you in this noble enterprise, the finest and most respectable which the human mind can member out." After Voltaire, religion would never be the same again in France.