School · 36 thinkers
Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
36 thinkers of Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.) on the Agora star map, from Emma Goldman to Amia Srinivasan, in chronological order.
- 1869–1940Emma Goldman
Real freedom means freedom from the state, from the church and from the marriage market – including the freedom to love, to plan births and to refuse war.
- 1888–1985Carl Schmitt
For Schmitt, politics is ultimately about deciding who is friend and who is enemy, and real sovereignty shows itself in the power to suspend the law.
- 1903–1993Hans Jonas
Because technology can now destroy the future, we have a new duty: act so that human life on earth can continue.
- 1906–1975Hannah Arendt
For Arendt, politics means acting together among equals in public, and the worst evil is often done by ordinary people who have stopped thinking.
- 1909–1997Isaiah Berlin
Being left alone and being master of oneself are two different kinds of freedom, and the second can be twisted into forcing people to be free; good values can truly clash.
- 1909–2004Norberto Bobbio
Democracy is first of all a set of rules saying who decides and by what procedure; it has not kept all its promises, but it lets power change hands without bloodshed, and the left is defined by its commitment to greater equality.
- 1909–1943Simone Weil
Pure attention to others, especially those in deep affliction, is the heart of ethics – and obligations to people come before rights.
- 1912–1984Chaïm Perelman
Where values are at stake, proof is impossible but reasoning is not: argument seeks the agreement of an audience, starts from premises it accepts and measures itself against a “universal audience” of all reasonable people; formal justice means treating like cases alike.
- 1921–2002John Rawls
Justice is what we would agree to without knowing our place in society – inequalities are fair only if they help the worst off.
- 1929–2026Virginia Held
Caring relationships, not contracts between strangers, are the basis of moral and political life, and a just society has to value care.
- 1929–1968Martin Luther King Jr.
Nonviolent resistance meets injustice with love and accepts suffering instead of inflicting it; an unjust law is no law in the moral sense, and whoever breaks it openly and accepts the penalty in order to rouse the community’s conscience shows the highest respect for law itself.
- 1929–2025Alasdair MacIntyre
Modern morality is a jumble of fragments; to make sense of a good life we must return to the virtues and the traditions that carry them.
- 1929–2022Nel Noddings
Morality starts not with rules but with actually caring for another person, and schools should teach children to care.
- 1931–1982Carla Lonzi
Women do not want equality, which only means becoming like men; they need neither Hegel’s dialectic nor the class struggle, but the self-awareness they find among themselves, as the unexpected subject of history.
- b. 1931Charles Taylor
Who we are is formed in dialogue with others and with ideals we care about – so recognising people’s identities is a political duty.
- b. 1933Amartya Sen
Development means expanding what people are really free to do and be – and justice improves by comparing real alternatives, not dreaming up an ideal.
- b. 1936Carol Gilligan
Moral psychology built its stages on studies of boys and men; many women reason from relationships and responsibility, and this “different voice” is not a lower stage of morality.
- 1938–2002Robert Nozick
People have rights that no one may override for the common good, so the only just state is a minimal one that protects them.
- 1940–2026Luisa Muraro
Philosophy begins not with doubt but with knowing how to love the mother, from whom we received life and language; women’s freedom grows from recognising this origin and the authority of other women, not from rights granted by men.
- b. 1940Carole Pateman
The social contract is said to make everyone free and equal, but it was made among men and rests on a contract that subordinates women; democracy needs participation, not only the choice of rulers.
- b. 1941Onora O’Neill
Duties come before rights, justice does not stop at borders, and trust needs real accountability rather than mere transparency.
- b. 1946Catharine A. MacKinnon
Inequality between the sexes is not a matter of difference but of domination, built above all into sexuality; the law has to see harassment and similar practices as what they are: discrimination.
- b. 1947Adriana Cavarero
Each human being is unique, and this uniqueness shows not in what someone is but in who someone is, in the life story that others tell; a philosophy of abstract Man forgets bodies, birth and sexual difference.
- b. 1947Martha Nussbaum
A just society ensures that every person can actually do and be certain basic things – and emotions are judgments about what matters.
- 1949–2006Iris Marion Young
Justice is not just about who gets what, but about ending oppression and domination, which wear many faces in everyday life.
- 1951–2021Charles W. Mills
The social contract of modern political philosophy was in practice a “racial contract” among white people – and theories of justice must face this history instead of ignoring it.
- 1952–2021bell hooks
Feminism must include Black and poor women, because racism, capitalism and patriarchy work as one system – and education can set people free.
- b. 1952Christine Korsgaard
Morality binds us because we cannot act at all without valuing our own humanity – and animals too are ends in themselves.
- b. 1953Michael Sandel
We are not unencumbered individuals but members of communities, and some things – like civic life, dignity and our children – should not be for sale.
- b. 1954Kwame Anthony Appiah
You can be loyal to your own people and still owe respect and concern to strangers everywhere – and race is not a real essence.
- b. 1958Uma Narayan
Culture is not a fixed essence – the problems of Indian women are neither simply traditional nor imported from the West.
- b. 1959Elizabeth Anderson
Equality means that no one dominates anyone else, not that everyone gets the same share – and the modern workplace is a private government.
- b. 1959Kimberlé Crenshaw
Black women can face discrimination as Black women that the law misses when it looks at race and sex one at a time – this is what “intersectionality” names.
- b. 1967Alice Crary
Seeing the world rightly is already a moral achievement, and the lives of animals carry meaning that a detached, number-crunching ethics cannot see.
- contemporaryShannon Vallor
To live well with powerful technologies we need character – virtues like honesty, courage and care – and AI is a mirror that shows us our past, not our possibilities.
- b. 1984Amia Srinivasan
Even our desires are shaped by politics: who is found attractive reflects race, class and gender – yet no one is owed sex, and the task is to question our desires without policing them.