What is social and political philosophy?

What is social and political philosophy?

Social and political philosophy is a very broad area of research that includes examinations and evaluations of all aspects of social life, from the family to the nation-state, to international relations.

Author John Edward Bowle* defines political philosophy as

"A branch of philosophy that is concerned, at the most abstract level, with the concepts and arguments involved in political opinion. The meaning of the term political is itself one of the major problems of political philosophy. Broadly, however, one may characterize as political all those practices and institutions that are concerned with government."

According to this author, "The central problem of political philosophy is how to deploy or limit public power so as to maintain survival and enhance the quality of human life. Like all aspects of human experience, political philosophy is conditioned by environment and by the scope and limitations of mind, and the answers given by successive political philosophers to perennial problems reflect the knowledge and the assumptions of their times. Political philosophy, as distinct from the study of political and administrative organization, is more theoretical and normative than descriptive. It is inevitably related to general philosophy and is itself a subject of cultural anthropology, sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. As a normative discipline it is thus concerned with what ought, on various assumptions, to be and how this purpose can be promoted, rather than with a description of facts—although any realistic political theory is necessarily related to these facts. The political philosopher is thus not concerned so much, for example, with how pressure groups work or how, by various systems of voting, decisions are arrived at as with what the aims of the whole political process should be in the light of a particular philosophy of life."

*Professor of Political Theory, College of Europe, Brugge, Belgium, 1950–67. Author of Politics and Opinion in the 19th Century.

• (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy)
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