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Best introductory texts in political philosophy?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 19–I KNOW IT'S THE HOLIDAY PERIOD, BUT THIS DESERVES MORE COMMENTS (THANKS TO THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY WEIGHED IN)

Continuing with our new series about introductory texts, I now invite readers to name what they think are the best introductory texts in politcial philosophy. As before, don't just name a text, but say something about why you think it's particularly notable or valuable.  Although you don't have to sign  your comment, I do think signed ones will carry more weight with readers.

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15 responses to “Best introductory texts in political philosophy?”

  1. Ram

    Will Kymlicka's "Contemporary Political Philosophy" is a clearly written and accessible introduction to Political Philosophy. It nicely and sympathetically reviews not only Rawlsian and liberal-egalitarian ideas, but also has chapters devoted to libertarianism, marxism, feminism, and communitarian thought.

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  2. Sam Arnold

    I like Adam Swift's "Political Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide". It's analytically-oriented, very well-written, and covers several core concepts: freedom, justice, democracy, and equality. I find his discussion of Rawls and Nozick especially helpful for undergrads.

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  3. Matt

    I have long liked Jonathan Wolff's _An Introduction to Political Philosophy_. The most recent addition also includes a discussion of race and sexual orientation, it seems, for those who want that, though I haven't read that edition. The book is very clearly written, and though it's organized around themes rather than thinkers, does a good job of introducing the main arguments of many important thinkers in clear ways. In that way, it could easily enough be paired with readings from primary texts for those who (like me) like to take a historical approach to the topic. I'll add that Wolff is very far above average at presenting the ideas of people he doesn't agree with in clear and sympathetic ways. (I suppose that, rather than primary sources, the book could also be paired with his equally good books on Nozick and Marx.)

    If someone teaching such a class wanted to over global justice, I'd think that Jon Mandle's _Global Justice_ in the Polity "Key Concepts" series would be a good choice. It's also fairly short, very clearly written, and nicely organized. It has a good grasp of the relevant empirical literature relating to trade and development, and the legal issues on human rights, and develops what seems to me to be a highly plausible "moderate cosmopolitan" view. It's not strictly an "introductory" work, but could work well as one, I think.

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  4. CWMorris

    I have not kept up with these texts. Once there were virtually none, or none I’d consider giving to students. Jean Hampton’s text with Westview was nice, and some of the chapters I still distribute to students. The one book of this kind which I really like is John Simmons’s text. It’s quite comprehensive and takes seriously questions about structure and institutions — why have states or political society? Taking these questions seriously is quite different from simply assuming that we live in states which must be democratic, that “distributive justice” requires the equal distribution of goods and the difficult questions pertain to the currency of equality. I think it’d be good were these texts to engage more with political sociology and political economy. Our perspectives tend to be normative, but these can lead us to lead us in rather unreal directions, involving strange “states of nature” or utopian deliberative democracies or cosmopolitan fantasies.

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  5. alex stingl

    I will mention a German book here, but there is a reason, which I'll come to.
    In 2000, Wolfgang Kersting edited a book "Politische Philosophie des Sozialstaates" (Political Philosophy of the Welfare State). The reason I am mentioning this is that maybe there are similar examples in English, namely a book that one would think immediately as about "too much into" some empirical arena to be a good introduction. But I found, indeed, that Kersting's edited collection – in part because of a comprehensive introduction – did an excellent job of serving as an intro to political philosophy in general. There are on occassion interesting introdctins in unexpected pla ces, similarly as there are the most exceptionally good introductions to Foucault and discourse analysis in journals on nursing.

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  6. Vaughn B. Baltzly

    I would second the Adam Swift book, and for the same reasons (though I don't actually utilize the section on Rawls & Nozick, so can't speak to that).

    As a graduate student in 2001, I had the privilege of driving Lee Hamilton to an event. He mentioned that he's always wanted someone to write the equivalent of Heilbroner's _The Worldly Philosophers_ (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Worldly-Philosophers/Robert-L-Heilbroner/9780684862149) for political philosophy.

    I still think that would be a great contribution. Any takers?

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  7. David Morrice

    I taught modern political philosophy/theory for over 30 years, always taking a historical, text based approach. For much of this time I recommended to students Ian Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought, which offers clear, reliable and historically informed introductions to most of the main theorists. However, students did not always share my high estimation of the book. I then decided to recommend Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, despite it adopting a concept based approach to the subject, albeit with ample reference to the main theorists and texts. This was very well received by students, who found it to be a well written and enjoyably readable. Wolff succeeds in offering a good introduction for those with no previous experience of the subject.

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  8. James Lenman

    Plato: Crito

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  9. Aaron Garrett

    I'm also a fan of the A. John Simmons book. Really gets students thinking.

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  10. Charles Pigden

    When it comes to political philosophy I think a case can be made for teaching directly from some of the classic texts. For 30 years I've been teaching a 200 level course on Moral and Political Philosophy partly based on Hobbes’ Leviathan. The students like him because he develops powerful and easy to understand arguments for a bunch of positions that most of them find fascinating but repellent. The 17th century prose takes a bit of getting used to but once you do it's not hard to determine where he's going with his arguments and how they are supposed to work (In the Leviathan at least he's endeavouring to demonstrate his theses ‘more geometrico’ whilst giving himself an ideological license to spice up his arguments with rhetoric and jokes.) This puts the students on their mettle stimulating them to work out for themselves where he is right and how he's wrong. He raises all sorts of interesting issues about scarcity, collective action, invisible hand mechanisms (both the back of the invisible hand which smacks us down and the palm of the invisible hand which lifts us up), human nature, prisoners dilemmas, prudence, archism versus anarchism, the sociability or unsociability of humankind, equality and what it means, feminism and sexuality, rationality and egoism. International relations theory (so-called political realists taking their cue for a few short lines of Hobbes) war and peace, checks and balances (in which Hobbes did not believe though most of my students do). democracy and whether it's a good idea, egoism and altruism, class, property rights, totalitarianism and tyranny and – in a New Zealand context – the Treaty of Waitangi our foundation document which can be construed as either a Lockean or a Hobbesian social contract. Talking about Hobbes is a way in to all sorts of contemporary . issues. For example, I usually point out that the two great English philosophers, Hobbes and Locke were both political refugees for a substantial part of their lives, Hobbes as a refugee from a nascent parliamentary regime which he definitely had reason to fear and Locke as a refugee from a royalist regime which was pretty clearly out to get him. (We have the reports of royalist spies and provocateurs who tried to tempt him into treasonable remarks in the College common room) In an immigrant society such as New Zealand (in which even people of predominantly Maori descent usually have some non-Maori ancestry) a large proportion of my class will be descended from refugees of one kind or another especially if we include the descendants of the victims of the Highland Clearances or the Irish Potato Famine. Even if we don’t say very much about the contemporary refugee crisis, simply raising the issue promotes historical and cultural awareness. Perhaps it is worth adding that the second half of this course is largely devoted to meta ethics concentrating on Hutcheson and Hume who students read either in Sayre-McCord’s edition of ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’ or Raphael’s’ anthology ‘The British Moralists’. A text-book to my mind is not really necessary (though the second part of the course complements a more up-to-date paper on meta-ethics t taught by Alex Miller who is of course the author of ‘Contemporary Metaethics an Introduction’)

    Otago has a PPE program including a keystone course designed to stitch the three subjects together . It too is a 200-level course, the students having taken at least one Philosophy course, one Politics course and two introductory Economics courses. (Blurb: . Core ideas of political economy from the early modern period to present day with applications to policy problems) Here too we (it’s team taught course, hence the ‘we’) tend to teach directly from historical texts, Locke’s ‘Two Treatises’, Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’, (emphasising their views on property rights) Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’ Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ and ‘The Theory of the Moral Sentiments‘ (which my colleague, the economist David Fielding treats as a pioneering text in Behavioural Economics), Malthus ‘The principles of Population, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Capital etc. Now of course we don’t expect the students to read these books in toto and they get a lot of context from lectures and handouts, but again it seems to me that direct contact with the texts works reasonably well. However (in a nod to Vaughn Baltzley) I at least recommend Heilbronner’s ’The Worldly Philosophers’ as useful background reading. It’s (a book regarded as inspirational by one of my economist colleagues.).

    Relevant additional point. Otago is not a highly selective university like Oxford or Cambridge, though by the second year the less capable students have often selected themselves out. But in my experience students don’t have to have come from highly cultured backgrounds in order to grapple successfully with historical texts. An introductory intermediary is not always necessary though no doubt helpful in many cases.

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  11. Allen Hazen

    I just found out (browsing the philosophy shelf at a second-hand bookstore…) that Heilbroner, in addition to writing the "The Worldly Philosophers," edited a collection (title something like "words from" or similar, "from the worldly philosophers"): a collection of mostly short selections, from the people covered in his book and others (there are some economic justice relevant passages from the Old Testament, and a Mandeville's "Fable"). I doubt this would do as a textbook, but it, or something like it, ought to be a good supplement: on reserve at the library, maybe (most of the selections look like things that could be read in one sitting).
    Since economics — done right — would study a large and important part of social (and so, in a broad sense, political) life, and since it IS a very good book, I second Baltzley and Pigden: Heilbroner's own book ought to be recommended as supplementary reading.

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  12. Dahmir Muhammad

    I liked Matt Zwolinski's "Arguing About Political Philosophy." I'll add, though, that Wolin's "Politics and Vision," which was assigned as the primary text in an undergraduate "social and political philosophy" course I took, was far too historical to be fit for a course like that. However, the course was designed around index card-based questions we handed in at the beginning of class for participation credit, and so was dominated by student discussion rather than lecture (for the portions which used Wolin's book as a jumping off point). Jason Brennan's "Political Philosophy" textbook is worth skimming.

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  13. Dale C. Matthew

    I'll also second Swift's "Political Philosophy: A Beginner's Guide," which if I recall correctly focuses on issues of distributive justice, and A. John Simmons' "Political Philosophy," which focuses more on issues of political authority. I still think that Simmons has been underappreciated as a political philosopher.

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  14. mike

    Chris Daly's Philosophy of language book is excellent.

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  15. Edwin Wilkinson

    The best introductory text is Gary Kemp's What is this thing called Philosophy of Language. Kemp's approach is to explain the theories of key philosophers – Frege, Russell, Kripke, Davidson and Quine (about whom Kemp is expert), and Wittgenstein. Students with no prior knowledge will appreciate the clarity and the way ideas are developed from simple beginnings – naïve semantics – to the more complex theories. A great springboard to more in-depth study of Philosophy of Language.

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