Introduction to Political Theory

A twentieth-century theorist, John Plamenatz, criticised Hobbes on grounds that if his description of the state of nature were a ...

In the next section we turn to two other contract theorists – Locke and Kant – but we argue that their thought is sufficiently d ...

there was no pre-contractual law in Hobbes’s state of nature there was nothing to adjudicate. Because individuals in Locke’s sta ...

Kant provides a simple example: a shopkeeper knows he can get away with overcharging a customer, but feels moved to inform the c ...

of course, create a divide within human psychology between moral autonomy and political subjectivity. Kant and liberalism The ri ...

utility as something ‘mentalistic’ – a feeling or state of mind. This raises an epistemological question: how do we know someone ...

utilitarianism to the other members of the ‘liberal family’. What makes utilitarianism part of the family? (a) As do Hobbes, Loc ...

Women who suffer additional oppression, such as racism, are overrepresented in the global prostitution industry. In societies w ...

together, for individual freedom can conflict with democracy, which in a mass society often takes the form of preference aggrega ...

Questions Is ‘toleration’ a coherent concept? Can the justification for the state be reduced to ‘mutual advantage’ – that is, t ...

Weblinks On the case study: Defence of the Swedish prostitution laws (Swedish government): http://www.government.se/sb/d/ 4096/a ...

Chapter 9 Conservatism Introduction Conservatism is an elusive ideology. Although there are conservative streams of thought in p ...

Because I am a conservative... A s of summer 2014, 16 countries and a number of subnational jurisdictions have legalised marriag ...

Conservatism: an elusive ideology? Anybody with a basic knowledge of party politics, but coming to political theory for the firs ...

1.Rejection of ‘rationalism’ Conservatives often use the metaphor of a ship at sea to explain their objections to what they call ...

in history. This may seem to misdescribe the history of many national institutions; for example, the United States and modern Fr ...

Human understanding must be drawn from experience. All the materials of thinking – perceptions – are derived either from sensat ...

made people distrustful of one another, and rendered society unstable. As does Hobbes, Hume argues that we are all better off un ...

criticism. The political consequence of abstract thought, Burke argues, is terror. Against abstraction, theory and dogma, Burke ...

the Glorious Revolution was, in fact, a revolution at all, but rather a reassertion and restoration of ‘ancient liberties’). He ...