Politics is a confusing business. It’s hard to tell who believes in what. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether anybody believes in anything. Twenty years ago, New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ and Bill Clinton’s ‘triangulation’ strategy attempted to converge on the middle ground. Politicians worried about focus groups and desperately tried to stay on message, scared to say anything that might be spun into ammunition by their opponents. There was some serious debate about policies, but little about the values that underlay them. It almost looked as if values were uncontroversial and politics a merely technical matter: politicians disagreed about how best to achieve agreed goals and voters tried to decide which of them had got it right.

Now debate is more polarized and aggressive – and elections more unpredictable. Campaigns seek to stir emotions, to tap into widespread mistrust of politicians, while social media facilitate an increasingly tribal politics. Nationalism is on the rise, liberalism on the retreat, but there is also a surge of support for more egalitarian and cosmopolitan alternatives, especially among the young. In some ways, these new fault lines offer voters clearer choices. In other ways, the shift from reasoned debate to a ‘post-truth’ era makes politics more confusing than ever. And, at the rhetorical level, all continue to appeal to the same fuzzy feel-good concepts. Who is against community, democracy, justice or liberty?

But politicians who share the view that liberty matters, or that justice is important, may have very different ideas about what they involve. Even where they agree about what values mean, they may weight them differently. These disagreements feed through into policy. What we ought to do about immigration, tax rates, welfare, education, abortion, pornography, drugs and everything else depends, in part, on how and what we think about values. Some politicians may be clear about which interpretations of which ideals guide their policy preferences, and how important each is compared to the others. Many are not. And even where they are, that doesn’t necessarily help those of us whose job it is to choose between them. To do that we need to be clear about our own principles. We need to be aware of the different interpretations of these ideals. We need to see where claims presented in their terms conflict and, when they do conflict, we need to decide which is right. We need political philosophy.

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Political philosophy is philosophy about a particular subject – politics. Any definition of ‘the political’ is controversial. If the personal is political, as the feminist slogan has it, then institutions like the family, and other personal relationships, have a political dimension. Perhaps politics happens wherever there is power. There is a lot to be said for such a view. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this beginners’ guide I’m going to stick to the narrower perspective that sees ‘the political’ as concerned specifically with the state. Political philosophy asks how the state should act, what moral principles should govern the way it treats its citizens and what kind of social order it should seek to create. This isn’t as narrow as it looks actually, since it includes the question of what we should do, as individuals, when the state isn’t doing what it should be doing. It also includes the crucial question of what should and should not be subject to political control – what is and is not the proper business of the state. So even on my narrow view, political philosophers have plenty to think about.

As those ‘shoulds’ suggest, it is a branch of moral philosophy, interested in justification, in what the state ought (and ought not) to do. The state, as political philosophers think about it, isn’t – or shouldn’t be – something separate from and in charge of those who are subject to its laws. Rather, it is the collective agent of the citizens, who decide what its laws are. So the question of how the state should treat its citizens is that of how we, as citizens, should treat one another. The state is a coercive instrument. It has various means – police, courts, prisons – of getting people to do what it says, whether they like it or not, whether they approve or disapprove of its decisions. Political philosophy, then, is a very specific subset of moral philosophy, and one where the stakes are particularly high. It’s not just about what people ought to do, it’s about what people are morally permitted, and sometimes morally required, to make each other do

My way of thinking about politics may seem misguided. The emphasis is on morality, on what principles should regulate citizens’ dealings with one another, and what kinds of state action it would be right or wrong for them to support. The central categories are values or ideals, such as justice, liberty, equality, community, democracy. But many people see politics as fundamentally different from morality. Politics, it may seem, is the art of the possible. It is about negotiating a solution that is acceptable to people with different interests, about keeping people happy – and getting them to vote for you – rather than giving them, or telling them, what they ought to want. The BBC has a radio programme called The Moral Maze that debates the moral issues that lie behind topical political debates. As soon as contributors start to talk about anything vaguely practical, to worry about the feasibility of a particular proposal, or to factor in electoral considerations, the chairman urges them to stick to the moral questions, putting aside the merely ‘political’ ones.

Sometimes, indeed, politics is regarded as something like the opposite of morality. ‘Was that decision principled, taken on the basis of moral values, by reference to an ideology or set of core ethical beliefs? No, it was “political”’ – for which read opportunistic, unprincipled, strategic and, increasingly, dishonest. Often, it seems, the moral course of action lies in one direction, while the ‘politics’ of the situation requires one to take another. If politics is the art of the possible, then the art of politics is that of compromise, of wheeling and dealing, fudging and, if you’re a politician today, managing the media. The Italian Machiavelli (1469–1527) believed that political leaders should not feel themselves bound by traditional morality and could engage in all kinds of cunning and duplicity in order to hold on to power.

This conventional contrast between politics and morality might suggest that I’ve set off on the wrong track. Yes, someone might say, there are interesting questions about what politics ought to be like. But surely it’s going too far to claim that my perspective provides a plausible account of what politics is actually like. Advocates of the theoretical approach known as ‘political realism’ may accuse me of falling at the first hurdle. Doesn’t my account illustrate precisely what is most irrelevant and frustrating about philosophy in general, and political philosophy in particular: that it is too far removed from the real world to be useful, and too abstract and idealistic to have a proper understanding of the phenomena that it is supposed to illuminate?

It’s true that, defined my way, political philosophy aims to tell us how political institutions ought to be designed, what policies should be enacted, why individual citizens are justified in voting for one law rather than another. And it’s true that much that the state does, and much that individual citizens do to try to get the state to do things, is not usually thought of in such moral terms. But it’s not true that my approach simply misunderstands the nature of politics. On the contrary, it identifies what is really happening when the state makes and enforces laws. ‘Think about what is actually going on when we do politics’, it says. ‘You may see politics as a struggle for power between elites, or as a means by which one class maintains its domination over another, or as a beauty contest between more or less charismatic leaders, or as an attempt to construct emotionally compelling narratives. Doubtless it can, and often does, take those forms. But what politics really is, beneath all that, is a process by which some people get the state to back up, with its coercive apparatus, their preferred ways of doing things – to compel obedience from those who might not want to do things that way.’

The philosophical issues, then, concern what principles should govern the state’s activities, and our actions as individuals in relation to it, given this analysis of what the state – and hence politics – actually is. Should all those coerced into complying with the state’s directives have a say in determining all those directives, or is there a place for non-democratic decision-making? Within democracies, can the majority of citizens simply gang up on the rest and by sheer force of numbers vote through legislation that compels the minority to comply with its will? Do laws, to be legitimate and not the mere exercise of force, have to be justifiable to all those who are subject to them? Do individuals have rights – such as freedom of religion or of sexuality – that should take certain issues off the political agenda, beyond the reach of state action? These are moral questions, and very difficult ones, but they are derived from an understanding of what politics is, not simply what it ought to be.

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This book does not tell the reader what to think. Its aim is clarificatory and expository, not argumentative. It tries to present some of the more important arguments developed by political philosophers in a way that will help the reader to understand the issues at stake and to decide for herself what she thinks about them. True, getting a clearer sense of what a particular position involves may make that position less attractive or plausible than it seemed when things were less clear. True, I am critical of the way in which some arguments are formulated, mainly when they obscure what is really at stake. But I’m not trying to persuade the reader of any particular political views. When abstract topics like social justice, liberty, equality or community come up in political debate, or in my students’ essays, my usual reaction is not ‘I disagree with this person. Can I persuade her to change her mind?’ It is more: ‘This person is confused. Can I help her see some distinctions that would help her understand what she really thinks and why?’ I don’t pretend that my own views are irrelevant, or inscrutable to the careful reader. Making a distinction, or clarifying the precise meaning of a claim, is often the first step towards exposing the kind of simplification or ambiguity that leads people to get things wrong. (‘Now that you’ve seen what you’re actually saying, you can’t go on believing it, surely?!’) But it really wouldn’t bother me if, having read this book, somebody continued to hold all the political views that she did before she started, however mistaken. What matters is that she should understand better why she holds them, and have considered the reasons others might have to reject them.

For me, political philosophy proceeds in two stages. First, a lot of time and effort are spent making sure it is absolutely clear what claims are being made, what propositions are being asserted. Sometimes this is called ‘conceptual analysis’, which makes it look scary and tedious. Don’t be put off. This is just a fancy name for the obviously important job of working out what exactly people mean when they say things. (Asked at a New York cocktail party what philosophers actually do, one replied: ‘You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It’s a living’.) Suppose a friend tells you that she believes in equality of opportunity. Do you know what she believes in? I don’t. All kinds of different views get called that – all the way from the innocuous position holding that universities and employers shouldn’t be biased on grounds of gender or race to the radical view that all people, however talented or untalented, should have the same resources to devote to their life-plans. Something similar applies to all the other concepts that political philosophers are interested in. You never hear anybody saying they don’t care about justice, or liberty, but that doesn’t mean that everybody agrees on anything definite. Before we know whether we agree with someone, whether what they say is true, we have to know what it is they are saying. So we explore the different ways that people use words, investigate differing conceptions of the same concept, track how concepts have changed meaning over time or have different connotations in different cultures, and so on.

But this is just the first step, getting rid of confusion or misunderstanding so that we know exactly what it is that we are talking about. The second step is to decide what is the right thing to say about it. We want to know what statements mean in order to decide whether they are true. I can’t assess the validity of your views about the injustice of tax cuts, or the moral significance of equality of opportunity, or why socialism would be better than capitalism, until I know precisely what those views are. But, having got clear on what we’re talking about, philosophers make arguments in support of particular conclusions, trying to explain where those who disagree with us have gone wrong. We explore each other’s claims, seeing whether they stand up to scrutiny. So although this book doesn’t argue that one view is right and others mistaken, that’s only because this is a beginners’ guide. I do care about truth and trust that readers will make their own judgements about which of the various arguments gets closest to it.

This second step distinguishes my kind of political philosopher from a different kind, the postmodern kind who regards our interest in truth and reason as terribly old-fashioned. Postmodernism comes in a variety of (dis)guises, but, applied to politics, it tends to involve scepticism about the idea that there is such a thing as ‘truth’ and a mistrust of ‘reason’ as itself ‘socially constructed’ rather than a genuinely independent or objective basis for assessing and criticizing society. Since some postmodernists are doubtful about the idea of truth in sciences like physics and biology, it’s hardly surprising that they should be wary of the suggestion that one can apply that category to claims of the kind made in politics. I don’t know a better defence of my approach than the rest of the book, so I will leave it to the reader to judge whether the kind of thing we ‘analytical’ philosophers do is indeed worth doing.

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This is not a guide to the history of political philosophy. That history is fascinating and important but it’s not – for me – what matters. I know something about Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Arendt and the rest of the gang. Occasionally they’ll get a mention (with dates). But, when I read or teach the writings of these great thinkers, what grabs me is not the historical context in which they were written, or how what they thought developed over their lifetime, or anything ‘historical’. I want to know what they believed, how their arguments went, and whether what they believed is true, their arguments valid. Of course, working out what they believed – exactly what they meant when they wrote something – may well require detailed knowledge of the intellectual and other contexts in which they were writing. And again, of course, racing and explaining changes in their ideas, or apparent inconsistencies between their various writings, can help us render their views more precise. I greatly respect those historians of political thought whose careful scholarship and interpretative sensitivity has brought us a clearer understanding of what these great thinkers believed. But, for me, this is all preparatory to the task of analysis and assessment, of deciding whether they were right. I certainly don’t think that the pantheon of all-time greats holds a monopoly on wisdom. Just as scientists working today hold many more true beliefs about the world, and more precise ones too, than the greatest, most brilliant, scientists of the past – Galileo, Newton, Darwin – so even ordinary political philosophers can have profited from the genius of a Hobbes or a Rousseau without needing to spend their lives in historical scholarship, and without knowing all that much about what those extraordinary thinkers had to say.

From the range of concepts addressed by political philosophy, this book looks at six: social justice, democracy, liberalism and community, liberty, and equality. I’ve limited myself to six to keep the book manageable. I’ve chosen these six partly because they form a reasonably coherent group and partly because they are the ones that come up most frequently in actual political debate. This means they are the most relevant to those seeking guidance through the confusions of contemporary politics and it increases my chances of presenting philosophical arguments in an accessible way. The cost is that some very important concepts are left out. Two are the closely interrelated issues of authority and obligation. What, if anything, gives the state the authority to make people do what it says? Under what conditions, if any, do citizens have an obligation to do what it says? These are touched on in the opening part on democracy, but are not the focus there and receive nothing like the thorough treatment they get in other introductions to the subject.

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One last warning. The fact that the book is written for politicians as well as students does not mean that it is practical or policy-oriented. This will frustrate some, perhaps confirming the suspicion that philosophy – even political philosophy – is so much hot air or self-indulgence. (The ‘intellectual masturbation’ take on my chosen career.) On the few occasions when I have been at think-tank seminars bringing together political philosophers and politicians, that sense of frustration has been all too evident. For many politicians, a seminar (and presumably a book) is useful only if it yields a policy, or at least a slogan – ideally, one that will go down well with focus groups and electorates. This is a problem, sometimes two. In the first place, philosophers do not take kindly to the suggestion that they should tailor their conclusions to what other people happen to be willing to vote for. So even where sound principled arguments yield clear implications for policy, the policy that’s implied might well be an electoral disaster and hence of little use to politicians. But there can be a second, deeper, problem. It can be genuinely unclear what policies are implied even by clear principles. Conclusions about what we should do, in a particular context, can depend on a whole range of facts about the world that philosophers may know little or nothing about. It’s social scientists – economists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists – who are (supposed to be) the experts when it comes to questions about how the world works. Take a simple example from Part 1. Suppose one agrees with the most influential political philosopher of the last century, the American John Rawls (1921–2002), that inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth are justified only if those inequalities help, over time, to maximize the income and wealth enjoyed by the worst-off members of society. It is still a very good question, as Rawls himself acknowledges, what kinds and extents of inequality are indeed justified by that principle, what tax rates and what kind of welfare state it implies, and so on. Rawls even accepts that the principles he comes up with are indeterminate between capitalist and socialist ways of organizing the economy.

It’s not only politicians who get frustrated, and the problem isn’t only that we need social science as well as philosophy to tell us what to do. Over the past decade or so, the kind of political philosophy that Rawls goes in for has come under attack from other philosophers (and anti-philosophers) for being utopian and irrelevant. (Greek topos = place, ou = ‘not’, so ‘utopia’ = ‘not a place’.) These critics object to ‘ideal theory’ – theory which tells us what the ideal society would be like – though it’s worth noticing that there are two versions of the critique. Some focus on the utopianism. The charge here is roughly that philosophers who come up with ‘ideal theory’ are naive about human beings, overestimating their capacity for altruism and putting too much faith in rational moral principles. According to these ‘realist’ critics, the results are implausibly ambitious visions of an ideally just or good society – visions that can never be realized and that it might even be dangerous to aim for. Some claim that these philosophers misunderstand the nature of the political, neglecting the irrational, the emotional and sometimes the downright nasty that are inevitable parts of the struggle for power. From this perspective, philosophers who work on ideal theory are too idealistic.

Others worry more about irrelevance. Even where philosophers’ visions are realistic and desirable as long-term goals, they aren’t that helpful when it comes to the here and now. There is a gap between the principles that would be followed in the ideal society and those that apply in the, alas far from ideal, real world. Suppose you believe that, in a just society, rich parents would not be allowed to buy their children a better education than is available to poor children. The principle at stake here is some version of equality of opportunity (see Part 5) and it tells you that elite private schools should not exist. Does it follow that it would be wrong for you to send your own child to such a school if you had the money? The law allows it and other people are doing it; perhaps your local state schools are really not very good. (Perhaps they’re not good partly because the law allows it and other people are doing it.) Does it follow even that you should vote to abolish elite private schools if you were given the option? Other countries permit them. Maybe we need to allow rich parents the option or they will simply send their children abroad or move abroad themselves. It’s not obviously wrong to send your child to, or vote to allow, the kind of school that would have no place in an ideally just society. The issues are complex. But ideal theory doesn’t help us. What’s needed, according to this second criticism, is more non-ideal theory – theory that helps us think not about the perfect society but about what to do in our actual circumstances. From this perspective, philosophers who work on ideal theory are answering the wrong question.

I’m sympathetic to some of this. Political philosophers could helpfully devote more attention to the practical questions that confront us. They could do more to help us as citizens, when we come together to make, or at least to decide who is going to make, policy. And they could do more to help us as individuals, in our daily lives, as we make choices about how to act within the existing policy framework. (In another book I had a go at the issue of school choice.) But it’s not either/or. Philosophers who work on ideal theory don’t only tell us what the ideal society would look like; they also explain why that kind of society would be ideal. They explore and articulate the values that are needed for us to judge whether one policy, or personal decision, is better than another. Even if some of their overall visions are indeed utopian, we need careful thinking about ideals – such as democracy, social justice, liberalism and community, liberty and equality – simply to understand the issues at stake in the choices that we make, implicitly or explicitly, here and now.

Nonetheless, those hoping for guidance on policy – like those wanting to be told what to think, those interested in the history of political thought, and deconstructors of truth and reason – will be disappointed and might do best to stop here. This book is for those who want to think for themselves about the moral ideas that structure political argument. The concepts to be discussed form the backdrop in front of which everyday political debate is played out. Consciously or otherwise, and with less or more clarity and control, politicians conceive and couch their positions – including their positions on specific policies – in terms that invoke particular interpretations of those concepts. This book aims to help those politicians, and those of us judging between them, to become more conscious of these background ideas, and better able to assess the interpretations and arguments framed in their terms.

Further reading

There are several excellent introductions to political philosophy. One is Jonathan Wolff’s An Introduction to Political Philosophy (3rd edn, Oxford University Press 2015), which manages at once to cover all the big areas in political philosophy and to give readers a glimpse of the big names in the history of political thought (Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx). Another is Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2002). This is not really the introduction it says it is, but it is an extremely helpful guide to the literature up to 2002, and should be useful both for advanced undergraduates and for the more determined lay reader. Political Philosophy: A Complete Introduction (Teach Yourself 2012), by Clare Chambers and Phil Parvin, is much gentler, while Catriona McKinnon’s Issues in Political Theory (3rd edn, Oxford University Press 2014) assembles an authoritative and accessible collection of survey articles and is linked to an Online Resource Centre. David Miller’s Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2003) is very short and very good.

For ways into the debate about ‘ideal theory’ and the practical relevance of political philosophy, I’d suggest Raymond Geuss’s polemical Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton University Press 2008), Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane 2009), and Adam Swift and Stuart White’s ‘Political Theory, Social Science and Real Politics’, in David Leopold and Marc Stears (eds.), Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford University Press 2008). My book about school choice is How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (Routledge 2003).