Fact Check: Political Theory

Political Theory or Political Philosophy is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of laws by authority: what they are, if they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect, what form it should take, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if any.

Political theory also engages questions of a broader scope, tackling the political nature of phenomena and categories such 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 politicas, respectively) is used, perhaps a reflection of the discipline's eclectic nature.

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

In the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (2009), the field is described 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 relation to the academic disciplines of political science, history, and philosophy; between the world of politics and the more abstract, nominative 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."

Some of the most notable political philosophers, and a quick summary of their important works, include:

• St Thomas Aquinas - In synthesizing Christian theology and Peripatetic (Aristotelian) teaching in his Treatise on Law, Aquinas contends that God's gift of higher reason--manifested in human law by way of the divine virtues--gives way to the assembly of righteous government.
• Aristotle - Wrote his Politics as an extension of his Nicomachean Ethics. Notable for the theories that humans are social animals, and that the polis (the Ancient Greek city state) existed to bring about the good life appropriate to such animals. His political theory is based upon ethics of perfectionism (as is Marx's or other readings).
• Mikhail Bakunin - One of the most important political philosophers of anarchism (a political thought that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including nation-states, and capitalism).
• Jeremy Bentham - The first thinker to analyze social justice in terms of maximization of aggregate individual benefits. He is also the founder of utilitarianism (ethical theory that prescribe actions for the maximization of happiness and well-being for all affected individuals).
• Isaiah Berlin - Developed the distinction between positive and negative liberty.
• Edmund Burke - Irish member of the British Parliament. Burke is credited with the creation of conservative thought. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is the most popular of his writings where he denounced the French revolution. Burke was also a big supporter of the American Revolution.
• Chanakya - Wrote the influential text Arthashastra (an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on the subject) and considered as sone of the earliest political thinkers in Asian history.
• Noam Chomsky - He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind.
• Confucius - The first thinker to relate ethics to the political order.
• William E. Connolly - Helped introduce postmodern philosophy into political theory, and promoted new theories of Pluralism (diversity within a political body) and agonistic democracy (a political theory that emphasizes the potential positive aspects of certain forms of conflict in politics).
• John Dewey - Co-founder of pragmatism (a philosophical tradition that underscores language and thought as tools for problem solving  rather than just a mere descriptor of phenomena) and analyzed the role of education in the maintenance of democratic government.
• Han Feizi - Advocated a government that adhered to laws and a strict method of administration.
• Michel Foucault - Critiqued the modern conception of power on the basis of the prison complex (the relationship between the institutions of imprisonment and the businesses that benefit from them), a critique that demonstrated that subjection is the power formation of subjects in any linguistic forum and that revolution cannot just be thought as the reversal of power between classes.
• Antonio Gramsci - Instigated the concept of hegemony. He argued that the state and the ruling class use culture and ideology to gain the consent of the classes they rule over.
• Friedrich Hayek - He argued that central planning was inefficient because members of central bodies could not know enough to match the preferences of consumers and workers with existing conditions. Hayek further argued that central economic planning (a mainstay concept of socialism) would lead to a "total" state with dangerous power. He advocated free-market capitalism in which the main role of the state is to maintain the rule of law and let spontaneous order develop.
• G. W. F. Hegel - Emphasized the "cunning" of history, arguing that it followed a rational trajectory, even while embodying seemingly irrational forces. It influenced Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Oakshott.
• Thomas Hobbes - Generally considered to have first articulated how the concept of social contract (concerning the legitimacy of the authority of the state) can be reconciled with a conception of sovereignty.
• David Hume - He criticized the social contract theory of John Locke, et al. as resting on a myth of some actual agreement. Hume was a realist in recognizing the role of force to forge the existence of states and that consent of the governed was merely hypothetical. He also coined the "is/ought" problem, i.e., the idea that just because something is does not mean that it ought to be, which is very influential in normative politics.
• Thomas Jefferson - Political theorist during the American Enlightenment, famous for authoring the Unanimous Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen United States of America.
• Immanuel Kant - He argued that participation in civil society is undertaken not for self-preservation, as per Thomas Hobbes, but as a moral duty. First modern thinker to analyze the structure and meaning of obligation. Argued that an international organization was needed to preserve peace.
• John Locke - Like Hobbes, he described a social contract theory based on citizens' fundamental rights in the state of nature. He departed from Hobbes in that, based on the assumption of a society in which moral values are independent of government authority and widely shared, he argued for a government with power limited to the protection of personal property. His arguments may have been deeply influential to the formulation of the United States Constitution.
• Niccolò Machiavelli - Provided the first systematic analysis of how politics necessitates expedient and evil actions. He also gave an account of statecraft in a realistic point of view instead of relying on idealism.
• James Madison - American political thinker generally regarded as the "Father of the Constitution" and the "Father of the Bill of Rights." He is responsible for the concept of separation of powers in political thought where he proposed a comprehensive set of checks and balances that are necessary to protect the rights of an individual from the tyranny of the majority.
• Herbert Marcuse - Introduced the concept of "repressive sublimation," in which social control can operate not only by direct control but also by manipulation of desire.
• Karl Marx - Introduced the concept of Ideology and the theory of Communism.
• Mencius - One of the most important thinkers in the Confucian school. He is the first theorist to make a coherent argument for an obligation of the rulers to the ruled.
• John Stuart Mill - A utilitarian who also coined the name of the system.
• Montesquieu - Analyzed the protection of the people by a "balance of powers" in the divisions of a state.

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