---
title: Political Philosophy
sort: 150
section-id: ethics
description: Rawls, Nozick, communitarianism, and contemporary debates about justice, liberty, and the legitimate authority of the state.
language: en
---

# Political Philosophy

Political philosophy investigates the normative foundations of political institutions: the state, law, political authority, rights, and justice. Its central questions include: What justifies political authority? What makes a distribution of benefits and burdens just? What are the limits of individual liberty? What do citizens owe one another?

## The Social Contract Tradition

The dominant tradition in modern political philosophy grounds political authority in a *social contract* — an actual or hypothetical agreement among individuals to establish political institutions. The tradition includes Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, but it is John Rawls who gave it its most sophisticated contemporary form.

### Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1651) argued that without political authority, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."^[Hobbes, T. (1651). *Leviathan*, Ch. XIII.] Rational agents in the state of nature would contract into an absolute sovereign to secure peace. Hobbes's argument is primarily consequentialist in structure: sovereignty is justified by the order it creates.

### Locke
John Locke (1689) grounded political authority in natural rights — rights to life, liberty, and property that individuals possess prior to and independently of the state. Government is legitimate only if it protects these rights; when it systematically violates them, citizens have a right of revolution. Locke's theory provides the philosophical basis for liberal constitutionalism.^[Locke, J. (1689). *Two Treatises of Government*, Second Treatise.]

## Rawls's Theory of Justice

John Rawls (*A Theory of Justice*, 1971) represents the most influential work in twentieth-century political philosophy. Rawls aims to identify principles of justice that free and rational persons would accept in an original position of equality.

### The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

The *original position* is a hypothetical decision procedure. We imagine choosing principles of justice behind a *veil of ignorance*: we do not know our place in society, our class position, our natural abilities, our conception of the good, or the generation we belong to. This ensures impartiality — no one can tailor principles to benefit their particular position.^[Rawls, J. (1971). *A Theory of Justice*. Harvard University Press, §3.]

From behind the veil, Rawls argues, rational agents would choose two principles:

1. **The Equal Liberty Principle**: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.
2. **The Difference Principle**: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are: (a) attached to offices and positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

The principles are *lexically ordered*: the first has absolute priority over the second. Basic liberties cannot be traded off against economic gains.

### The Difference Principle

The Difference Principle is Rawls's most distinctive and controversial contribution. It permits inequalities only if they maximally benefit the worst-off group. This *maximin* strategy — maximise the minimum position — is what rational agents under uncertainty would choose, according to Rawls.

The argument: since I do not know whether I will be advantaged or disadvantaged, and since the stakes (basic life prospects) are very high, rationality demands choosing the arrangement that makes the worst-case scenario as good as possible.

## Nozick's Libertarianism

Robert Nozick (*Anarchy, State, and Utopia*, 1974) offers a forceful alternative.^[Nozick, R. (1974). *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*. Basic Books.] Beginning from strong Lockean natural rights — that individuals may not be used against their will as means to others' ends — Nozick argues that only a minimal state (limited to protecting against force and fraud) is justified.

Any more extensive state violates individual rights. Redistributive taxation, for Nozick, is morally equivalent to forced labour: it takes the product of a person's labour and transfers it to others without consent.

Nozick's *entitlement theory* of justice: a distribution is just if it arises from just original acquisitions and just transfers. Historical process, not distributional pattern, determines justice. No patterned principle — whether egalitarian or utilitarian — can be maintained without continuous interference with free exchange.

### Wilt Chamberlain Argument
Nozick's celebrated argument: suppose we start from any distribution D1 you consider just. Wilt Chamberlain, a basketball star, charges fans 25 cents per game to see him play. One million fans freely pay. Now Chamberlain has $250,000 more than D1 allowed. Is D2 unjust? But it arose through voluntary exchanges from a just starting point. Any patterned theory must continuously prohibit voluntary exchanges — and this is incompatible with liberty.

## Communitarianism

In the 1980s, a group of philosophers — Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer — challenged liberalism's conception of the self and the priority it gives to justice over the good.

**Sandel's critique of the unencumbered self**: Rawls's original position presupposes a self that is prior to and independent of its ends and social roles. But this is incoherent: we cannot abstract ourselves from the constitutive attachments and community memberships that make us who we are. A more adequate political philosophy would recognise that we are *embedded* in communities whose values and traditions define our identities.^[Sandel, M. (1982). *Liberalism and the Limits of Justice*. Cambridge University Press.]

**Walzer's complex equality**: Justice requires that different social goods — money, political power, medical care, education — be distributed according to their own internal norms, not reduced to a single metric. Injustice is not inequality per se but *dominance*: when one good (typically money) is used to control access to all others.^[Walzer, M. (1983). *Spheres of Justice*. Basic Books.]

## Global Justice

Rawls's *The Law of Peoples* (1999) applied his framework internationally, but controversially limited global distributive obligations to "duty of assistance" to "burdened societies." Cosmopolitan theorists (Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz) argue that global economic institutions impose injustice on the world's poor, generating stringent obligations to reform them.^[Pogge, T. (2002). *World Poverty and Human Rights*. Polity Press.]

The debate between Rawlsian nationalism and cosmopolitanism turns on whether Rawlsian principles apply only within cooperative schemes (nation-states) or to all human beings as such.

## Further Reading

- Freeman, S. (2007). *Justice and the Social Contract*. Oxford University Press.
- Cohen, G.A. (2008). *Rescuing Justice and Equality*. Harvard University Press.
- Kymlicka, W. (2002). *Contemporary Political Philosophy*, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.
