PLSC7N Ideologies People Flash Cards for Final

PSU Behrend PLSC7N Finals People

An Austrian economist and political philosopher, he was a firm believer in individualism and market order, and an implacable critic of socialism. His pioneering work, The Road to Serfdom (1944), developed a then deeply unfashionable defence of laissez-faire and attacked economic intervention as implicitly totalitarian. In later works, such as The Constitution of Liberty (1960), he supported a modified form of traditionalism and upheld an Anglo-American version of constitutionalism that emphasized limited government.

Friedrich von Hayek

A British political philosopher, he advanced a powerful defence of a non-ideological style of politics that supported a cautious and piecemeal approach to change. Distrusting rationalism, he argued in favour of traditional values and established customs on the grounds that the conservative disposition is ‘to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible’. His best-known works include Rationalism in Politics (1962) and On Human Conduct (1975).

Michael Oakeshott

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Irving Kristol

A US political philosopher, he developed a form of rights-based libertarianism in response to the ideas of John Rawls. Drawing on Locke and nineteenth-century US individualists, he argued that property rights should be strictly upheld, provided that property was justly purchased or justly transferred from one person to another. His major work, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), rejects welfare and redistribution, and advances the case for minimal government and minimal taxation.

Robert Nozick

A consistent opponent of absolutism, he is often portrayed as the philosopher of the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’,. Using social contract theory and accepting that, by nature, humans are free and equal, he upheld constitutionalism, limited government and the right of revolution. The stress he placed on property rights prevented him from endorsing political equality or democracy in the modern sense. His foremost political work is Two Treatises of Government (1690).

John Locke

A Scottish economist and philosopher, he is usually seen as the founder of the ‘dismal science’,. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he developed a theory of motivation that tried to reconcile human self-interestedness with unregulated social order. His most famous work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), was the first systematic attempt to explain the workings of the economy in market terms.

Adam Smith

A German philosopher, his ‘critical’ philosophy holds that knowledge is not merely an aggregate of sense impressions; it depends on the conceptual apparatus of human understanding. His political thought was shaped by the central importance of morality. He believed that the law of reason dictates categorical imperatives, the most important of which is the obligation to treat others as ‘ends’, and never only as ‘means’,.

Immanuel Kant

An American political philosopher and statesman, he influenced the development of liberal ideology through natural rights theories. In the American Declaration of Independence, he described inalienable rights as those of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. He expressed the sentiment that ‘That government is best which governs least’.

Thomas Jefferson

A Martinique-born French revolutionary theorist, he is best known for his views on the anti-colonial struggle,. In his classic work on decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth (1965), he drew on psychiatry, politics, sociology and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre in arguing that only total revolution and absolute violence can help black or colonized people to liberate themselves from the social and psychological scars of imperialism,.

Franz Fanon

An Italian politician, he founded the Fascist Party in 1919 and was the leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943. His political philosophy stressed that human existence is only meaningful if it is sustained and determined by the community. This required the construction of a ‘totalitarian’ state, based on the principle that no human or spiritual values exist or have meaning outside the state.

Benito Mussolini

An Indian spiritual and political leader (called Mahatma, ‘Great Soul’), he campaigned tirelessly for Indian independence, which was finally achieved in 1947. His ethic of non-violent resistance, satyagraha, reinforced by his ascetic lifestyle, gave the movement for Indian independence enormous moral authority. His political philosophy was based on the assumption that the universe is regulated by the primacy of truth, or satya.

Mohandas Gandhi

A US historian and political scientist and later politician, he was the 28th president of the USA (1913–21). His ‘Fourteen Points’, laid down in 1918 as the basis for peace after World War I, proposed to reconstruct Europe according to the principle of national self-determination, and to achieve security through a ‘general association of nations’,. Wilsonian liberalism is usually associated with the idea that constructing a world of democratic nation-states is the surest way of preventing war.

Woodrow Wilson

An Italian nationalist, he is often portrayed as the ‘prophet’ of Italian unification,. He practised a form of liberal nationalism that fused a belief in the nation as a distinctive language and cultural community with the principles of liberal republicanism,. In his view, nations are effectively sublimated individuals endowed with the right to self-government, a right to which all nations are equally entitled.

Giuseppe Mazzini

A German poet, critic and philosopher, he is often portrayed as the ‘father’ of cultural nationalism,. His emphasis on the nation as an organic group characterized by a distinctive language, culture and ‘spirit’ helped both to found cultural history and to give rise to a form of nationalism that emphasizes the intrinsic value of the national culture,. His major work was Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91).

Johann Herder

A Geneva-born French moral and political philosopher, he is commonly viewed as the architect of political nationalism, but also influenced liberal, socialist, and anarchist thought,. In The Social Contract (1762), he argued that ‘natural man’ could only throw off the corruption imposed by society through a radical form of democracy, based on the ‘general will’,.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A Jamaican political thinker and activist, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he was an early advocate of black nationalism,. Placing a particular emphasis on establishing black pride, his vision of Africa as a ‘homeland’ provided the basis for a pan-African philosophy and an associated political movement,.

Marcus Garvey

A French political thinker and leading figure within the political movement Action Française, he was a key exponent of right-wing nationalism and an influence on fascism,. His idea of ‘integral nationalism’ emphasized the organic unity of the nation, fusing an illiberal rejection of individualism with a stress on hierarchy and traditional institutions.

Charles Maurras

A German philosopher, his complex and ambitious work stressed the importance of will, especially the ‘will to power’, and influenced anarchism, feminism, and fascism,. He emphasized that people create their own world and make their own values, expressed in the idea that ‘God is dead’,. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he emphasized the role of the Übermensch, who alone are unrestrained by conventional morality,.

Friedrich Nietzsche

An Italian idealist philosopher, he was a leading figure in the Fascist government, 1922–9, and is sometimes called the ‘philosopher of fascism’,. Strongly influenced by the ideas of Hegel, he advanced a radical critique of individualism. In political terms, this implied the establishment of an all-encompassing state that would abolish the division between public and private life once and for all,.

Giovanni Gentile

A French social theorist, he is widely viewed as the architect of modern racial theory,. In his major work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, he advanced a ‘science of history’ in which the strength of civilizations was seen to be determined by their racial composition. In this, ‘white’ people—and particularly the ‘Aryans’—were superior to ‘black’, ‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ people, and miscegenation was viewed as a source of corruption and civilizational decline.

Joseph Gobineau

A US feminist writer, political activist and artist, she developed a comprehensive critique of patriarchy in Western society and culture that had a profound impact on radical feminism,. In Sexual Politics (1970), she analysed the work of male writers, highlighting their use of sex to degrade and undermine women,. She defined politics as ‘power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another’.

Kate Millett

A French novelist, playwright and social critic, her work reopened the issue of gender politics and foreshadowed the ideas of later radical feminists,. In The Second Sex (1949), she developed a complex critique of patriarchal culture, in which the masculine is represented as the positive or the norm, while the feminine is portrayed as the ‘other’,. She famously pointed out, ‘Women are made, they are not born’.

Simone de Beauvoir

An Australian writer, academic and journalist, her The Female Eunuch (1970) helped to stimulate radical feminist theorizing,. Its principal theme was the extent to which male domination is upheld by a systematic process of sexual repression. She suggested that women are conditioned to a passive sexual role, which has repressed their true sexuality.

Germaine Greer

A cultural critic, feminist and writer (known by her pen name, bell hooks), she has emphasized that feminist theorizing must take account of intersectionality and be approached from the lenses of gender, race and social class,. In her classic Ain’t I a Woman (1985), she advanced a powerful critique of the implicit racism of the mainstream women’s movement.

Bell Hooks

A US marine biologist and conservationist, she did much through her writings to stimulate interest in scientific and environmental topics, contributing to the growth of the green movement,. In her best-selling The Silent Spring (1962), she highlighted the malign consequences to humans, birds, fish and plant life of the widespread use of powerful toxic agents within US agriculture,.

Rachel Carson

A UK atmospheric chemist, inventor and environmental thinker, he is best known as the inventor of the ‘Gaia hypothesis’,. This proposes that the Earth is best understood as a complex, self-regulating, living ‘being’,. Lovelock was also the first person to alert the world to the global presence of CFCs in the atmosphere, and he is, controversially, a supporter of nuclear power,.

James Lovelock

A German-born UK economist and environmental theorist, he championed the cause of human-scale production and advocated ‘Buddhist economics’, or ‘economics as if people mattered’,. In his seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973), he attacked conventional economic thinking for its obsession with growth for growth’s sake,. In contrast, he stressed the importance of morality and ‘right livelihood’.

Fritz Schumacher

A US anarchist social philosopher and environmentalist, he was a leading proponent of the idea of ‘social ecology’,. He linked the environmental crisis to the breakdown of the organic fabric of both society and nature,. As an anarchist, he emphasized the potential for non-hierarchic cooperation within conditions of post-scarcity and radical decentralization,.

Murray Bookchin

A US ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science, her work has highlighted links between gender oppression and the ‘death of nature’,. She developed a feminist critique of a scientific revolution that explained environmental degradation ultimately in terms of the application by men of a mechanistic view of nature. On this basis, she argued that a global ecological revolution requires a radical restructuring of gender relations.

Carolyn Merchant

A Norwegian philosopher, writer and mountaineer, he has been described as the ‘father’ of deep ecology,. His philosophy, Ecosophy T, was influenced by the ideas of Spinoza, Gandhi’s ethic of non-violence and Taoist thought. His work was based on the assertion that ‘the Earth does not belong to human beings’, as all creatures have an equal right to live and bloom,.

Arne Naess

A Jerusalem-born US academic and literary critic, he was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause and a founding figure of postcolonial theory,. He developed a humanist critique of the Western Enlightenment that uncovered its link to colonialism. He highlighted ‘narratives of oppression’ and condemned Eurocentrism’s attempt to remake the world in its own image. His key works include Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Edward Said

A Canadian political philosopher, he is often seen as the leading theorist of liberal multiculturalism,. In Multicultural Citizenship, he argued that certain ‘collective rights’ of minority cultures are consistent with liberal-democratic principles,. For him, cultural identity and minority rights are closely linked to personal autonomy,.

Will Kymlicka

A Canadian academic and political philosopher, he drew on communitarian thinking to construct a theory of multiculturalism as ‘the politics of recognition’,. He emphasized the twin ideas of equal dignity and equal respect, reflecting the extent to which personal identity is culturally situated,. His most influential work in this area is Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1994).

Charles Taylor

A Canadian political theorist, he has championed a plural form of political society that accommodates the needs and interests of indigenous peoples,. He portrayed modern constitutionalism as a form of imperialism that denies indigenous modes of self-government. In its place, he advocated ‘ancient constitutionalism’, which respects diversity and pluralism.

James Tully

An Indian political theorist, he has developed an influential defence of cultural diversity from a pluralist perspective,. In Rethinking Multiculturalism (2005), he rejected universalist liberalism on the grounds that what is reasonable and moral is embedded in and mediated by culture. He argues that ‘variegated’ treatment is required to put ethnic, cultural or religious minorities on an equal footing with the majority community.

Bhikhu Parekh

An Iranian cleric and political leader, he was the architect of the ‘Islamic Revolution’ and leader of Iran (1979–89),. His world-view was rooted in a clear division between the oppressed (the poor and excluded of the developing world) and the oppressors (the USA and the Soviet Union). In his Shia fundamentalism, Islam was a theo-political project aimed at regenerating the Islamic world by ridding it of occupation and corruption from outside.

Ayatollah Khomeini

An Egyptian writer and religious leader, he is sometimes seen as the ‘father’ of modern political Islam,. A leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he highlighted the condition of jihiliyyah (‘ignorance of divine guidance’) into which the Muslim world had fallen. He advocated Islam as a comprehensive political and social system that would both ensure social justice and sweep away corruption, oppression and luxury.

Said Qutb

An Indian politician, he was born into a deeply religious, lower-middle class Gujarati family. He was assigned to the BJP, the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, four years later. He served as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, when he led his party to victory in the Lok Sabha, after which he was sworn in as prime minister of India,. Among other things, he has stressed that the practice of yoga is intrinsic to Hindu identity.

Narendra Modi