2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad becomes president of Iran, taking a religious hard line and reversing previous reforms.
Influenced by Islamic puritanism, as well as Marxism and post-colonial thinkers, Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati advocated Islamic thought and beliefs as pillars of Islamic society, while promoting independence from Western domination.
"There is no prophecy which is as advanced, powerful, and conscious as the prophecy of Muhammad."
Ali Shariati
Shariati sought to defend Islam from misconceptions. For him, these misunderstandings were largely the result of an unhealthy divide between the educated class and the masses in Iran. He distinguishes between intellectuals and enlightened people. The latter, he argues, do not require a university degree, but rather an awareness of traditions, religion, and the needs of the people.
Anti-intellectual
In their attempt to apply European models of development and modernity to Iran, intellectuals fail to recognize that conditions in Iran are different from those in Europe. Intellectuals fail to acknowledge the Islamic spirit that dominates and sustains Iranian culture, and often blame religion for a failure to acknowledge material concerns. The emancipation of Iran is only possible by recognizing the country’s Islamic roots and the creation of an egalitarian social system that adheres to religious norms. While the masses may need more self-awareness, intellectuals need more “faith”. Shariati’s views were not a rejection of modernity – to him, Islam was a fundamental tool for Iran to come to grips with the modern world.
See also: Muhammad • Mahatma Gandhi • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk • Abul Ala Maududi
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Communitarianism
FOCUS
Just war theory
BEFORE
1274 Thomas Aquinas sets out the moral principles of a just war in Summa Theologica.
14th–15th centuries Scholars at the School of Salamanca conclude that war is just only when it is waged to prevent an even greater evil.
1965 The US begins a ground war in Vietnam. The US’s eventual defeat, coupled with domestic opposition, leads to a reappraisal in the US of the moral boundaries of war.
AFTER
1990 US president George Bush invokes just war theory prior to the First Gulf War.
2001 US-led forces invade Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
When is war justified? What conduct is permissible on the battlefield? Questions like these have troubled political thinkers for as long as people have waged war. Augustine of Hippo provided an early examination of the conditions for just warfare, suggesting that defence of oneself, or others in need, was not only a moral justification for warfare, but an imperative. Later, in his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas put forward the basis of modern just war theory, suggesting that war cannot be fought for personal gain and must be waged by a legitimate body, and that the overriding motive must be to secure peace.
However, recent rapid advances in military industrialization, complex inter-relations between states, and the emergence of guerrilla warfare all challenge the solidity of the ethical underpinning to armed conflict. Michael Walzer is a US political philosopher regarded as one of the most eminent just war theorists of the last century. His work has reinvigorated just war theory and provided the impetus for a new set of responses to the complexities of conflict. For Walzer, war is, in certain circumstances, necessary, but the conditions for warfare and its conduct are subject to strong moral constraints and ethics.
However, Walzer believes that a just and necessary war may need to be fought to the full extent of the means available, however horrific that might seem. For instance, if the killing of civilians is judged likely to hasten the end of the war, it might be justified. He believes that those waging war should be subject to moral restraints, but that those restraints cannot be absolute.
Just and unjust wars
Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars argues for the maintenance of a strong ethical base, while holding that warfare is sometimes necessary, but rejects moral absolutism – the idea that some acts are never morally permissible.
Walzer suggests that in modern conflicts, the muddied dynamics of the battlefield and the complex ethics involved provide challenges to ethical thinking. He gives the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II as an example of a very difficult case to judge. Nuclear weapons, in particular, trouble Walzer, who suggests that they shift the boundaries of morality so drastically that it is now difficult to make a moral framework for warfare. However, as a last resort, even the most extreme measures might be justified.
The use of nuclear weapons in war profoundly affected Walzer’s ideas. The immense destructive capabilities of these weapons led him to urge a reassessment of the ethics of warfare.
MICHAEL WALZER
Michael Walzer was born in New York and attended Brandeis University, Boston and the University of Cambridge in the UK before completing his doctorate at Harvard in 1961. He went on to teach a course at Harvard in the 1970s in tandem with Robert Nozick, which provided the genesis for two influential books: Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, and Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. He was made emeritus professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University in 2007.
Walzer’s work has been influential in a number of areas, including just war theory, but also taking in equality, liberalism, and justice. As a supporter of self-governing communities, he has been concerned with civil society and the role of the welfare state. A leading public intellectual, his work on just warfare has influenced many contemporary politicians and military leaders.
Key works
1977 Just and Unjust Wars
1983 Spheres of Justice
2001 War and Justice
See also: Sun Tzu • Augustine of Hippo • Thomas Aquinas • Niccolò Machiavelli • Smedley D. Butler • Robert Nozick
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Liberalism
FOCUS
Libertarian rights
BEFORE
1689 John Locke writes two treatises on government outlining a social contract.
1944 In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek condemns government control through central planning.
1971 John Rawls’s book A Theory of Justice argues for the state to correct inequalities in society.
AFTER
1983 Michael Walzer looks at how society distributes “social goods” such as education and work in Spheres of Justice.
1995 Canadian theorist Gerald Cohen publishes a Marxist critique of Rawls and Nozick titled Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality.
The position of individual rights in an era of strong states and extensive public institutions has proved a fertile ground for political theory. Prominent in the debate has been philosopher Robert Nozick, whose work was in part a response to the ideas of John Locke and John Rawls.
Locke, writing his Second Treatise on Government in 1689, provided the foundations of the theory of the modern state by suggesting that people held individual rights, but that some form of state was needed to enforce them. From this came the notion of the social contract, outlined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whereby individuals give up some of their freedom in order to have protection from the state.
"Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them."
Robert Nozick
Rawls’s influential 1971 book A Theory of Justice built on this idea by proposing a variant of the social contract, which he believed reconciled it with the ideas of liberty and equality that were explored in Locke’s work. Rawls suggests a framework that allows individuals to collectively agree on an idea of justice that is based on fairness and equality rather than personal self-interest, laying a foundation for social democracy. Nozick drew on Locke and Kant to argue that there were dangers in the forms of cooperation that lay in Rawls’s argument. He revived the idea of libertarianism, which holds that the reach of the state should be as limit
ed as possible.
The result of Nozick’s argument was the notion that any form of state other than the minimal was incompatible with individual rights, and therefore unjustifiable. Where the state became involved in any activity other than the most basic – “protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on” – then it would infringe the rights that Rawls sought to preserve.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Nozick’s most vivid description of this view was in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argued for a minimal state and provided a series of direct responses to the claims made by Rawls. The book was developed from a course taught by Nozick at Harvard with the political theorist Michael Walzer, which took the form of a debate between the two. Later, Walzer became one of the most significant critics of the arguments made in the book.
Perhaps the most famous conclusion reached in Anarchy, State, and Utopia was the idea that taxation, as employed by modern states to redistribute income and fund public agencies, was morally indefensible. In Nozick’s view, it amounts to a form of forced labour, where a proportion of a person’s work compulsorily benefits others. Indeed, Nozick went as far as to imagine this as a form of slavery, where every member of society had some claim of ownership to an individual’s labour.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia proved hugely influential and helped define the modern boundaries of the debate between libertarian thought and liberalism. Often read alongside A Theory of Justice, it ranks as one of the most important works of political philosophy in the modern era.
Taxation is described as a form of slavery by Nozick, in the sense that members of society can demand a portion of an individual’s labour, making it into a forced employment.
ROBERT NOZICK
Born in New York in 1938, Robert Nozick was the son of a Jewish entrepreneur. He pursued an academic career, training at Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton universities.
Initially drawn to the ideas of the Left, his reading of Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and other free-market thinkers during his graduate studies moved his standpoint towards libertarianism. His career was spent mostly at Harvard, where he established himself as one of the leading figures in libertarian thought. Famously, he is said to have only ever taught the same course twice.
Nozick’s most significant work of political theory was his first, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, though he wrote on a variety of subjects throughout his career, and did not restrict himself to political philosophy. In later life he rejected extreme libertarianism, and suggested limits on inheritances.
Key works
1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia
1981 Philosophical Explanations
1993 The Nature of Rationality
See also: John Locke • Immanuel Kant • Henry David Thoreau • John Rawls • Michael Walzer
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Islam
FOCUS
Human rights activism
BEFORE
1953 A CIA-backed coup overthrows the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq.
1979 The Islamic revolution, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, removes an autocratic monarchy and inaugurates an Islamic republic that brings in a series of repressive laws.
AFTER
2006 Peaceful demonstrations for women’s rights are broken up in Tehran, Iran, and several demonstrators are sentenced to prison terms and corporal punishment.
2011 The “Arab Spring” brings rapid social and political change to a number of states in North Africa and the Middle East, though not to Iran.
The position of human rights in Islamic states raises issues that have serious implications for political thought. The roles women take in public life, in particular, have been curtailed by the rise of fundamentalism, with gender discrimination pursued through a number of retrograde laws. The correct response to these problems, and especially the role of Western powers, has been much debated by Islamic thinkers.
Shirin Ebadi is a Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist. A practising judge prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, she was forced to cease legal work as the result of a series of laws enacted by the new regime, which restricted the rights of women. Despite this, Ebadi sees women’s rights as entirely compatible with Islam, and suggests that the previously strong position of women in Iranian society points to the regime as the problem, rather than Islamic law.
The role of Western nations and values in promoting human rights in this environment is hotly contested. Ebadi argues strongly against Western intervention in Iran, suggesting that, despite the regime’s poor human rights record, gender discrimination, and a lack of democracy, any involvement by foreign powers would be undesirable and unhelpful – and would simply make matters worse. Instead, she believes change must come from within, and points to the relatively strong women’s movement in Iran compared with other Islamic states.
Iranian women protested in 1979 against new laws requiring them to cover up in public. Ebadi believes that the oppression of the regime can only be reversed by Iranians themselves.
See also: Emmeline Pankhurst • Abul Ala Maududi • Simone de Beauvoir • Ali Shariati
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
War studies
FOCUS
Empirical political science
BEFORE
1881 Russian tsar Alexander II is killed by a suicide bomber.
1983 In Lebanon, two suicide bomb attacks on US and French barracks in Beirut are claimed by the Islamic Jihad.
2001 The 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda are followed by US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
AFTER
2005 A series of suicide bomb attacks on buses and trains across London kills 52 people.
2009 Sri Lanka’s civil war ends after 26 years, during which time the Tamil Tigers carried out 273 suicide attacks.
2011 The US withdraws its military presence from Iraq.
Suicide terrorism has widely been believed to be an expression of religious fundamentalism, fuelled by a ready supply of willing martyrs. American political scientist Robert Pape has compiled evidence to suggest that suicide terrorism is in fact a secular tactic rather than a religious one, and forms part of a broader campaign to remove an occupying force from the area perceived by the perpetrators to be their homeland.
"There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions."
Robert Pape
A strategic response
Pape’s 2005 publication Dying to Win analyses all known instances of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2003: a total of 315 attacks. He found that the attacks were not explained by individual motives and beliefs, and discovered little correlation between religion and suicide terrorism. He proposed instead a “causal logic of suicide terrorism”, which suggests that such actions are a strategic response to foreign occupation by a democratic power. Pape’s research found that every terrorist campaign, and more than 95 per cent of all suicide bombings, had the objective of national liberation at their heart.
The corollary of this argument is that the use of military force by foreign powers to subjugate or reform societies will serve only to promote a larger number of suicide terrorists than would otherwise be the case. As Pape argues, suicide terrorism is not the result of an existing supply of fanatics, but is a “demand-driven phenomenon”.
See also: Abul Ala Maududi • Frantz Fanon • Ali Shariati • Michael Walzer
DIRECTORY
The most important ideas of political thought and some of the most prominent political thinkers have been presented in this book, but inevitably there has not been space to include all who have shaped the political thinking of the world throughout the ages. This directory, although by no means exhaustive, gives some information on a selection of those figures who have not been dealt with elsewhere, including their achievements and the ideas for which they are best known. It also gives links to other pages in t
he book that discuss the ideas, movements, and thinkers they have been associated with or that have influenced their thinking, and others that they have inspired.
DARIUS THE GREAT
c.550–486 BCE
Darius I seized the Persian crown in 522 BCE. He put down rebellions that had previously toppled his predecessor, Cyrus the Great, and expanded the empire into central Asia, northeast Africa, Greece, and the Balkan region. To administer this huge empire, he divided it into provinces overseen by satraps, who also administered the system of taxation. The satraps were based in regional capitals such as Persepolis and Susa, which were the sites of massive construction projects. To unify the empire, Darius also introduced a universal currency, the daric, and made Aramaic the official language.
See also: Alexander the Great
MENCIUS
c.372–289 BCE
Also known as Mengzi, the Chinese philosopher Mencius is believed to have studied with one of Confucius’s grandsons, and his interpretation of Confucianism did much to establish it as a model of government during the Warring States period. Unlike Confucius, he stressed the essential goodness of human nature, which could be corrupted by society, and advocated education to improve public morals. He was also less respectful of rulers, believing that they should be overthrown by the people if they ruled unjustly.
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