Political Philosophy Research Articles

North America and European Union Policy Changes Towards Higher Education Relations with China: A Comparative Study

Current geopolitical tensions have impacted higher education relations between China and the West. Bridging a gap in literature, this research compares convergence and divergence of North America (NA) and European Union (EU) policy changes towards higher education relations with China. Drawing on Multiple Streams Framework, this study highlights divergent rationales and outcomes between the NA policies aimed at decoupling (de-Chinaization) and the EU policies focused on derisking in continuing engagement. Both regions strive to enhance research security and diversify students recruitment, yet the NA intensifies visa restrictions and funding scrutiny, whereas the EU maneuvers to balance the risks of such engagement with the benefits. These shifts remind us Brubacher's political philosophy of higher education, underscoring the value-laden nature of higher learning and policy decisions.

What’s in a Word? Revisiting the Role of Ideology in the Practice of and Scholarship on Countering Violent Extremism

ABSTRACT Within the field of terrorism studies, the role of ideology as motivational driver in radicalization processes leading to violence is controversially discussed. Only very few attempts to move the discourse beyond a binary and narrow framing of ideology as a doctrinal belief system exist so far. Terrorism research, it appears, has yet to discover the rich and valuable insights from political psychology and philosophy that have studied ideologies for many decades. Similarly, the study and practice of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE), including deradicalization and disengagement, have also so far mostly operated with only a very rudimentary, binary and outdated understanding of ideology in the context of motivations to quit extremism and terrorism. This article charts the research landscape on ideology in political psychology and philosophy. It suggests a more nuanced understanding of ideology, which allows for P/CVE researchers and practitioners to access the intricate inner mechanisms of ideologies and to make significantly improved strategic decisions about which intervention methods with what goals and purposes can and should be applied to initiate and sustain motivation for deradicalization and disengagement through the use of the so called “ideological triangle” in combination with Michael Freeden’s morphology of ideologies concept.

Сомнительные основания (Peter F. The Grounds of Political Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)

The manuscript is a review of the monograph The Grounds of Political Legitimacy by Fabienne Peter, the French political philosopher. Following the suit of the modern Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, the author of the monograph offers a metanormative approach to the analysis of legitimacy, focused on identifying the types of obligation on which it can be built. Legitimacy is interpreted in the book as a normative property of a political decision, which makes it binding for both the authorities and citizens. Based on the analysis and synthesis of possible foundations of legitimacy postulated in the existing normative theories, Peter comes to the conclusion that a political decision is made legitimate by the presence of an accessible cognitive authority. At the same time, it can be legitimate in the absence of such authority, if it is backed by the will of the people. According to the reviewer, Peter’s reasoning is purely speculative, and the result is trivial. It remains unclear why such a theory is needed at all, and whether it has any heuristic potential. The facts presented in the study do not speak for themselves. All the empirical material in the article comes down to agitation for Brexit, vaccination during Covid-19, and the Trump administration’s decision on migration. Having considered a number of alternative sociological and politological approaches to the analysis of legitimacy, the reviewer shows that all of them are superior to Peter’s theory in heuristic terms. His general conclusion is that the value of this kind of analytical political philosophy as a methodology for political analysis is questionable, and therefore Peter’s book is hardly of interest to political science.

Organizational wrongdoing in the real world: a response to Stephanie Collins’s Organizations as Wrongdoers

In Organizations as Wrongdoers,1 Associate Professor Stephanie Collins puts forward a sophisticated, thought-provoking, and carefully argued ‘metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations’.2 Collins’s book as a whole is committed to taking seriously how contemporary organizations actually operate in the real world and, for this amongst other things, it should be highly commended; not enough analytical political philosophy adopts such an orientation despite the enormous value in doing so. My main aim in this essay, then, is to demonstrate how even closer engagement with the real world – by engaging with, and mediated by, the disciplines of sociology and social theory in particular – would significantly strengthen Collins’s analysis. Organizations as Wrongdoers is divided into three parts. Part I sets out Collins’s central metaphysical argument: ‘members [and only members] are material parts of organizations’.3 Part II, building on the arguments in part I, is Collins’s account of organizational blameworthiness. Part III considers the implications of organizational blameworthiness for members. Sections 1 and 2 of this essay engage with some of Collins’s key arguments and moves in part I of her book, whereas the focus of Section 3 is part III.

Review Essay: On Colonial Legacies

Over the past few decades, the “turn to empire” in political theory has powerfully illuminated how legacies of imperialism and colonialism have profoundly shaped the conceptual history of core categories in modern political thought such as democracy, citizenship, freedom, equality, and the social contract. Early on, scholars in this vein of research focused their attention on tracing these dynamics among mostly canonical political thinkers. As the turn to empire has matured, however, a newer generation of studies is fixing its focus more significantly on the contemporary legacies of colonialism and empire in the present and alternative trajectories of political thought mounted by anticolonial activists and intellectuals in the periphery. Picking up on this tendency, the four books under review speak to each other in intriguing ways in both their differences and similarities. Thematically, all four books often share a common set of conceptual concerns despite speaking across an array of imperial and colonial contexts. Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire and Nazmul Sultan’s Waiting for the People are both interested in the entwinement of empire and popular sovereignty, yet in the different colonial contexts of the white settler colonies of the British Empire (in Valdez’s case) and British India (in Sultan’s case). Both Sultan and Sam Klug, who in The Internal Colony is writing about the post-World War II context of racial politics in the United States, are concerned with how anticolonial actors and thinkers enlisted developmental idioms and languages in their struggles against imperial rule and racialized exploitation. And both Valdez and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil grapple with the contemporary prospects of emancipation from and reparation of the harms engendered by the history of imperialism and colonial slavery.

Book Review: The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought , by Melvin L. Rogers The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought, by RogersMelvin L., Princeton University Press, 2023, 382 pp.

Book Review: <i>The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought</i> , by Melvin L. Rogers The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought, by RogersMelvin L., Princeton University Press, 2023, 382 pp.

Loyalty and Allegiance in Baltic German Political Thought after the First World War

Loyalty and Allegiance in Baltic German Political Thought after the First World War

Research Hotspots and Emerging Trends in Dong Zhongshu's Thought: A Visualization Analysis

The research examines studies related to Dong Zhongshu's thought in the CNKI database from one thousand nine hundred ninety-two to two thousand twenty-four, offering valuable insights into the academic landscape surrounding Dong Zhongshu’s studies. Using VOSviewer 1.6.18(0) and Excel, along with bibliometric analysis methods, this research provides a thorough outline of Dong Zhongshu's thought studies. Key findings indicate that scholarly publications on Dong Zhongshu's thought have not significantly increased in recent years. Yu Zhiping and Zhou Guidian have made notable contributions. Beijing Normal University and Shandong University stand out as the most prolific institutions. The journal Confucius Studies continues to be the leading core publication platform. Current Dong Zhongshu studies primarily focus on building political philosophy systems, establishing cosmology and ontology foundations, and understanding the interactive mechanism between ethics and politics. This research thoroughly maps the academic landscape of Dong Zhongshu studies, providing theoretical guidance and practical references for future advancements in this field.

Mutual engagement as methodology: Joseph Carens and the ‘Toronto School’ of Political Theory

ABSTRACT Political theory and political philosophy are marked by a wide variety of approaches, which can be grouped broadly into normative/prescriptive, historical, and critical traditions of political thought. These are not just distinct in terms of scholarly focus, but also in methods, standards for evaluation, informal networks, conferences, and journals. Many scholars spend their graduate school years and much of their careers largely engaged in one or another of these fields, leading to a fractionalization of political theory. This contribution offers a conceptual framework for better understanding their interrelated nature, seeing these distinct fields as part of a common project of political theorizing. We call this framework ‘The Toronto School,’ named after a class Carens taught for graduate students at the University of Toronto. The Toronto School is less a particular method for doing political theory (the way, say, Skinner or Foucault offers) and more an ecumenical understanding of political theory as a discipline, which sees the various approaches and aims of our field as having unique and complementing competencies and blindspots that fit into a more general project of intellectual inquiry. This contribution articulates the broad contours of the Toronto School, with a particular eye toward the way it reconciles normative, historical, and critical approaches.

Paulo Freire and Emancipatory Praxis in Africa

There has been a growing resurgence of interest in Paulo Freire in recent times. In much of this work, there has been a tendency to focus on him as a pedagogue rather than as an emancipatory political thinker; his involvement in and influence on liberation struggles in Africa, in particular, have received little attention. This is concerning, given that his involvement spanned a period of about two decades and came at a pivotal moment in both the continent’s history and his own life. Here, we critically reflect on Freire’s praxis in relation to the African continent, arguing that this warrants greater acknowledgement.

Framing and stereotyping of two frontline presidential candidates in Nigeria’s 2019 general election: evidence from Nairaland virtual community

ABSTRACT Contributing to the extant literature on media political discourse, this article examines Nigerians’ use of language in framing and stereotyping two frontline presidential candidates, Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, in the 2019 general election. Data were purposively sampled from Nairaland and classified into twelve comment types according to their thematic frames. Following a descriptive analysis, and using van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of critical discourse studies and Entman’s framing theory, we find that Nairaland netizens’ language practices demonstrate dichotomous framing and stereotyping of a negative “them” and positive “us” through the deployment of multiple discursive strategies: name-calling/abusive labelling, metaphorisation of political actors and pronominal selection. These strategies signify divergent political perceptions about the two candidates and their supporters. We conclude that Nairaland is a sociocultural site that enables Nigerian youth to express their political thoughts in terms of their preferred presidential candidates and political parties.

Kantian Republicanism

AbstractContemporary republican political theory, with its general commitment to freedom from domination, offers a powerful critique of social subordination. Here, I develop a novel republican critique of social subordination within the framework of a Kantian theory of right. The foundation of Kantian political philosophy is the right to freedom, which includes a general right not to be subordinated to others under law. Within this Kantian framework, wrongful social subordination is injustice that we have the right to be free of rather than something we should seek to minimize. Further, freedom from subordination is not an absolute right, nor is it the only right: not all social subordination is unjust, and there are forms of injustice beyond social subordination. Given these distinctive features, I argue that Kantian republicanism can enrich contemporary republicanism more broadly, as it enables nuanced and principled distinctions between different forms of social subordination while also making it possible to argue that particular forms of social subordination are unjust and categorically impermissible.

From polemics to dialogue: redrawing genre boundaries in eastern European philosophy during state socialism

Abstract This paper addresses the proliferation of “philosophical dialogues” as a genre in Eastern European state socialist philosophy. Focusing on Romania and Hungary, we contextualize this genre by referring to the increased preoccupation with dialogue manifested in the local philosophy after the 1960s, especially stressing the close contacts with Existentialism and its own production of philosophical dialogues. Subsequently, we look at the confluence between philosophical discourse and literary technique and at the personalization of philosophical discourse, which both constitute features of the genre, by showing how these derive from entirely different motivations in both cases, yet create unexpected convergences between them.

The Relations of Politics, Law, and Economics in a Social Philosophy Perspective

The relationship between politics, law, and economics forms the main foundation in the dynamics of national and social life. These three elements not only influence each other structurally but also create a power structure that directly affects the distribution of social justice, policy-making, and the functioning of state institutions. This study aims to examine in depth how the relationship between politics, law, and economics is formed, implemented, and questioned through a social philosophy approach, and how this approach can open up space for criticism of the structural inequalities that occur. The research method used is qualitative with an interdisciplinary approach that combines political, legal, and economic analysis within a social philosophy framework. Data were obtained through a literature review of critical philosophy, social justice theory, and relevant empirical studies. The analysis was carried out reflectively and thematically on concepts such as power, justice, law as an ideological instrument, and political economy in the context of the state. The results of the study reveal that the relationship between politics, law, and economics is often constructed to maintain the dominance of certain groups, rather than achieving social justice. Law is not always neutral, but usually becomes a tool for legitimising economic and political power. Politics also does not always run within the framework of democratic participation, but is often controlled by market interests. Social philosophy plays a crucial role in dismantling these power structures and providing ethical and critical perspectives to promote policy reform and social stability.Keywords: Social philosophy; political law economy; social justice; power; public policy

POST-TRUTH AND CRITICAL THINKING: IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS IN EDUCATION

Summary. The article is devoted to the consideration of ideological transformations of worldview knowledge, directly related to the functioning of the public imagination and the formation of both group and individual identity. The comprehension of socio-cultural dynamics related to the situation of post-truth and the implementation of guidelines, strategies, techniques, practices and methodologies of critical thinking in the field of education are also considered. The aim of the article is to consider the phenomenon of post-truth in the modern information field in relation to the concept of critical thinking and their explications in the social institution of education. The main attention is paid to the philosophical understanding of these phenomena in the context of philosophical and anthropological measurement of trends in the socio-communicative sphere of human existence. Methodological principles are the philosophy of information, the development of the paradigm of transhumanism, the search for modern world theory and practice, social philosophy. The article considers the essential preconditions and consequences for the humanitarian sphere in general and education in particular the current state of affairs with insufficient philosophical articulation of the concepts of post-truth and critical thinking. Scientific novelty. The article proves the ambivalent nature of the correlation between the phenomenon of post-truth and the concept of critical thinking on the occasion of the social institution of education and the sphere of social imagination. Conclusions. Critical thinking, based solely on skepticism, has been found to function as a precondition and a meaning-destroying element of post-truth as a theoretical construct and cognitive mechanism. The threat of dehumanization of the problem field of modern humanities outside the actualization of symbolic and axiological bases of human identity, which is relevant for both scientific discourse and education, is emphasized. Emphasis is placed on the need for a humanistic reinterpretation of critical human thinking, expressed in its social activity, identity acquisition and self-actualization.

Singapore and the ends of Conservatism in Postwar Asia: Wu Teh-yao across the Colonial, Christian, Cold War, and Chinese Worlds

This article uses the career and writings of political philosopher Wu Teh-yao (1916-1994) to argue that Singapore in the 1970s–1980s embodied crucial aspects of conservatism as a modern, transnational ideological project in post-Second World War Asia. Wu opposed radicalism and was sceptical towards liberal democracy and Westernisation, all while promoting culture and tradition to legitimise a less-than-democratic political and social order. His worldview was shaped by a peripatetic life that spanned Asia and the United States and found expression in his propaganda work for the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, presidency of Tunghai University, and, above all, contributions to nation building in Singapore. Indeed, during this period, no intellectual lent as much discursive and administrative support, in English and Chinese, to legitimising authoritarianism and social conservatism in the city-state. Both intellectual biography and social history of ideology, the article explains how Singapore represented the realisation of what we typically call ‘Asian Values’ and was embedded within a wider conservative ideoscape. It questions the conventional temporality and genealogy of Asian Values, arguing that they did not simply flow downwards from upon high, but were also produced and circulated by figures who operated between the state and public.

Kantian political philosophy, coercion, and public health.

Many public health policies are coercive and therefore, they require moral justification. Kantian political philosophy is an under-explored but appealing approach to public health ethics. According to the Kantian approach, which is centred around freedom as independence, the state has an important role in protecting that freedom. In doing so, the state is justified to use coercion. To illustrate the Kantian approach, we consider its implications in the context of coercive vaccination policy. We show coercive vaccination policies are justified, because the state is needed to provide determinacy, because such policies are needed to guarantee the systematic enjoyment of the right to freedom, and because such policies reduce the risk for dependence on others.

Situating Students to Utilize Political Thinking When Encountering Subtle Racist Rhetoric

In this manuscript, we discuss a six day project completed within a seventh grade civics classroom in the South to explore subtle racist rhetoric utilized by Senator Richard Russell. Our project looked at answering the following question. How do students articulate, if at all, how Senator Richard Russell used political rhetoric to subtly talk about civil rights issues? First, we provide a brief overview of Senator Russell and his political tactics with civil rights legislation. Next, our focus moves to examine how our project connects to best teaching practices for civics articulated in the C3 Framework. Then, we give the demographic information for the students and teacher in our project. Next, we discuss the steps of our project as well as data analysis techniques employed. Then, findings from student work are given. Finally, we close with a discussion section to talk about takeaways and next steps for future projects on helping middle school students analyze subtle racist rhetoric.

The Glass Paperweight in the Symbolic Framework of 1984: Historical Falsification, Cognitive Control, and Dehumanization

This study analyzes the symbolic role of the glass paperweight in George Orwell’s 1984 as a lens to expose totalitarian mechanisms governing history, memory, and humanity. The artifact embodies three key functions: a relic of a lost past, a metaphor for resistance against “Ingsoc,” and a symbol of freedom’s fragility. It connects to historical falsification via the “Ministry of Truth” and “memory holes,” activates Winston’s suppressed memories, and contrasts with the dehumanizing “telescreens” that erase individuality. Its destruction allegorizes the eradication of dissent, while its fragility mirrors Winston’s fate and its transparency echoes the regime’s omnipresent surveillance. Methodologically, the study combines structural-semantic text analysis (lexical patterns), philosophical interpretation of totalitarianism, and comparative examination of Oceania’s dystopian elements (“Newspeak,” surveillance). The novel contribution lies in systematizing the paperweight’s symbolism, previously overlooked, to unify the novel’s core themes: historical manipulation, cognitive control, and dehumanization. Key findings reveal: The paperweight materializes “forbidden” memory; its shattering by the Thought Police parallels Winston’s psychological collapse, illustrating individual resistance’s futility. Its destruction marks the triumph of technological control (“telescreens”) over human emotion and aesthetics, while fragmented memories fail to reconstruct alternative histories. The artifact’s contrast with totalitarian tools underscores the power imbalance in pursuing truth, highlighting rebellion’s impossibility under panoptic surveillance. By framing Orwell’s use of a minor object to convey universal dystopian principles, the study bridges 1984 to modern digital authoritarianism—mass surveillance and algorithmic manipulation—demonstrating its enduring relevance. These insights deepen understanding of the novel’s symbolic structure and its resonance with 20th–21st-century political philosophy, offering frameworks to analyze evolving totalitarian practices.

Kautilya on Statecraft

In reading the ancient Indian political texts the attempt is to understand the essential wisdom of the Indian knowledge system and thereby its immense contribution to the development of the epistemology of Indian Political Philosophy. Arthashastra is a timeless classic and was written by Kautilya. Arthasastra primarily was conceptualised as a practical manual of statecraft and administration for the rulers in ancient India and to the Mauryans in particular. Arthashastra has however, gone onto influence both the philosophical and pragmatic mapping of statecraft in many parts of the world especially among the Greeks and Europeans scholars. His study of statecraft in Arthashastra is said to be as much a book of the statecraft as it is a conceptual work discussing philosophical principles of the state.