Who Are Your Favorite Political Philosophers

Mine are

Marx

Rousseau

John Stuart Mill

and

Edmund Burke

eom

of course. I never led Dewey and Rawls but I have seen them referenced.

Great thread and it is interesting to read the favorites of others :-) Ethics was my favorite course and I am slowly trying to learn more about other philosophers...

just loved all that social stuff. Bismark did some wild things.

Do you mean Weber and Marx?:kick:

created the German social security system. Though he was an arch conservative or reactionary he realized capitalism needed to reform itself.

Healing the sick. Feeding the poor. Antagonizing the governmant. Blessing peacemakers.

We should be so lucky!


He may be the Shrub's fav, too, but he obviously hasn't learned anything from it.

Love the guy. "Why I am not a Christian" is one of my favorite works. I also love Emerson. I had a fling with some of Thoreau's works but came to realize you're either an Emerson fan or a Thoreau fan, and I lean more towards Emerson.

However, my favorite political philosopher is my father (he's not famous; you wouldn't have heard of him). Ultraliberal, appreciates the fine things in life such as quiet nights and sunny mornings, and has given me much useful advice on how to stay detached from this consumeristic mass-media-dominated society.

"Suppose I were and idiot and suppose I were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

:evilgrin:
dbt

with a bit of Adam Smith mixed-in for good measure! Okay, I know Smith is primarily an economist (as was Marx) but The Wealth of Nations is an important (and often misquoted) book in political economy.

Also J.S. Mill's "On Liberty."

Pierre Bourdieu
Richard Rorty
William James

I like Jacques Derrida as a thinker, but when he turns to politics, he's less compelling for me. Same with Leotard and Kristeva, among my favorite thinkers. I could say as much about the phenomenologists, from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and Levinas and lateley Irigaray, I enjoy their thinking but tend to tune out some of the political debates.

Here's where I scold myself for not having dug into Arendt, because I think I would enjoy her political ideas. Adorno and company never quite turned me on, intellectually.

Cornel West, I like where he's coming from. Sometimes I wish his ideas were more richly presented, but he's definitely provocative and deep.

Bourdieu is far and away the political philosopher I understand and enjoy and sympathize with most. But I always reserve a place in my thinking for the pragmatists, and especially the pluralism of William James.

n/t

hes more of a commentator.

And unlike Bush Jr, I've actually read His stuff :D

how JC is a political philosopher

Scripture touches into all fields of life. If you read the Gospels and try to interpret them from a political frame of mind, you'll get it.

The fact that he spent his whole life helping the poor and the neglected shows where his priorities are.....:kick:

You cannot truly appreciate Marx, untill you know how he lived.

Mills,

Locke,

and

Henry Lewis Mencken

classical liberalism is the basis of modern conservatism.

although at the time they may have seemed quite nice...being into social freedom...which wasnt the norm of the day...what with slavery, and women not being able to vote...they also were champions of freemarket economics.

it is debatable whether or not locke would have had the same feelings about economics if he had lived a a century and a half later, when the true face of industrial capitalism would show its ugly face. but either way...if u read locke as it is...with out making historical edits(assumptions)...he is preaching a very bush-friendly mantra.

just so ya know.

Locke is responsible for the liberal tradition all the way to Mill and beyond. While libertarians indeed share our "heritage," conservatives do not.

...as well as Russell.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Pure genius that guy had.

he was all over the place, and if u read his whole lifes work, he contridicts himself a thousand times over.

give me bakunin any day.....a REAL anarchist, who new man kind, and wasnt full of himself, and who wasnt trying to make history, coughcoughMARXcoughcough..and who wasnt full of himself...like proudhon.

holler, buster could own proudhon any day

bump

But his early assessments about property and liberty were right on target.

His early writings pretty much slammed the rest of economic philosophy in the face, and his writing style is just an amusing read. Many people would be turned off by it, but not me.

Plus, there are a lot of good Proudhon quotes out there. And I do believe that even though he was trying to make a name of himself by putting himself in the spotlight as he did (running for governmental positions and so on), he believed the stuff he was saying. I also believe he won the ‘famous’ arguments with Marx, and (less famous arguments with) Bastiat.

minus Marx

whos with me?

:evilfrown:

So I don't particularly like his Banks of Exchange and so on. I mean, they're quite brilliant, as far as access and use goes, but I think that it's unrealistic on our current economic level.

Bookchin is another good anarchist thinker, but I disagree with a lot of his interdependency stuff.

Pre-20th century:
-JJ Rousseau
-John Locke
-J.S. Mill
-Thucydides

-Wish their writing didn't make my head spin: Kant and Hegel. Marx is too dreary.
-Honorable mentions: Parmenides and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Last 100 years:
-John Rawls
-Jurgen Habermas
-Michael Walzer (even he has a hard time seeing past his pro-Israel bias)
-Richard Rorty (even if I disagree with him quite strongly)

-Hannah Arendt, Jeremy Waldron, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum are all on the bubble; Dewey is on the reading list.

... Groucho Marx and John Lennon

I ended up where I began. In the middle tilting ever so slightly to the left. I tend to believe the greatest right of all is the right to be left alone which is basically what John Stuart Mill argued in "On Liberty".

I liked Marx because he was a first rate polemicist. He could cut his enemies to shreds with a pen.

I liked Rousseau because his concept of being "forced to be free" . I believe some folks need to be "forced to be free"; freed from their selfishness and ignorance but I don't know how to accomplish it without violating my essentially liberterian principals.

I liked Locke because he is the father ,IMHO, of liberterianism.

When I was in college I didn't like Burke. I confused being a conservative with being a reactionary. But I will listen to the arguments of a thoughtful conservative. Burke supported change that was a result of sober decision making. He supported the American Revolution but not the French Revolution because of it's excesses.
I doubt he would feel at home with today's conservatives nor would they feel at home with him.

:bounce:

Neither are exclusively political, but both have written extensively
on the subject. Aristotle is very challenging.

nt