Political Thought
Multiresolution study notes
A map of political philosophy that you can read at six different resolutions. Begin anywhere; change depth whenever the ground feels unsteady.
Every passage below is written at six levels of explanatory resolution, from E to A+. They are not grades or stages: choose the resolution that makes the idea clear, change it whenever you like, and you stay exactly where you were reading.
Restoring your reading position…
Start anywhere
Full library- ConceptIntermediary bodiesCourts, estates and corporate institutions situated between rulers and subjects, capable of checking centralized power while sometimes entrenching unequal privileges.
- ConceptIdeologyFor Marx and Engels, a changing family of problems involving forms of consciousness that invert, naturalize, or express social relations and class positions rather than transparently describing them.
- ConceptRepublican libertyA form of political freedom associated with protection from domination, active civic power and institutions that prevent any one social force from controlling the whole political order.
- WorkSecond Treatise of GovernmentLocke’s account of natural equality, property, consent, limited government, tyranny and resistance explains how political authority can arise among free persons and how it can be forfeited.
- WorkOf the Social ContractRousseau’s account of legitimate political order joins the social pact, popular sovereignty, the general will, law and government in an attempt to reconcile political obedience with freedom.
- ThinkerKarl MarxPolitical and social theorist of alienation, material production, ideology, class struggle, capitalism, exploitation, revolution, and human emancipation, developed partly in collaboration with Friedrich Engels.