Politics: Key Concepts in Philosophy

by MacKenzie, Iain

• ISBN13: 9780826487940
• ISBN10: 0826487947
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-24
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Politics: Key Concepts in Philosophy offers a thorough, lucid and stimulating account of the central theories and ideas encountered in political philosophy. The text is thematically structured, covering the discipline's principal ideologies: Statism; Realism; Liberalism; Conservatism; Socialism; Anarchism; and Environmentalism. It also offers a brief history of political philosophy and the major political philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and Rawls, and, valuably, concludes with a look at 'applied' political philosophy, relating the discipline to contemporary political situations and questions.

Author Biography

Iain MacKenzie is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Kent, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: What is politics?	p. 1
What is politics?	p. 4
Government, governance and governmentalization	p. 9
Norms and varieties of political philosophy	p. 12
The political and politicization	p. 17
Authority and Liberty	p. 21
Absolute authority	p. 23
Limits to authority	p. 32
Individual liberty	p. 39
Liberty and the general will	p. 42
The State and Power	p. 51
The capitalist state	p. 52
The patriarchal state	p. 61
Three dimensions of power	p. 66
Power and normalization	p. 70
Social Justice and Equality	p. 75
The good life	p. 75
Value-pluralism	p. 78
Justice as fairness	p. 81
Justice as entitlement	p. 89
Care and justice	p. 91
The return of the good	p. 97
Democracy and Political Order	p. 102
Democracy and disorder	p. 104
Democracy and the value of political participation	p. 105
The difficult birth of liberal democracy	p. 110
From representative to deliberative democracy	p. 112
Agonism and political order	p. 119
Culture and Critique	p. 122
Background to the culture debates	p. 122
Cultural membership as a primary good	p. 125
Minority cultures and the rights of women	p. 129
Women, culture and identity	p. 131
The fusion of horizons	p. 136
Intersubjectivity and the politics of recognition	p. 138
Conclusion: Identity, Difference and Political Philosophy	p. 141
French feminist critiques of identity	p. 143
The trouble with gender	p. 149
The challenge of difference	p. 154
Difference in political philosophy	p. 158
Difference and political philosophy	p. 161
Bibliography	p. 165
Index	p. 171
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