• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Political philosophy beyond the state

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Flourishing, Human Nature, Monasticism, Politics, Social Science

≈ Comments Off on Political philosophy beyond the state

Tags

Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Great Learning, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, Thomas Hobbes

Modern liberal political philosophy has tended to take among its central questions: what is the proper relationship between the individual and the state? What rights does the individual have against the state, how do we select which individuals make decisions for the state? These are the central questions explored by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Likewise the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, produced by Abraham Bosse in collaboration with Hobbes, depicts a giant man (the monarch) who is made up of hundreds of smaller people – the state and the individuals.

These are, I submit, the wrong questions for political philosophy to ask. A key problem with the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau approach is it doesn’t think enough about what individuals are and why they would need a state. “Protection from violence” is the usual answer to the latter question, and it’s a venerable one – the idea that a state is established to protect its people is found in the Aggañña Sutta, in a passage that modern treatises on Buddhism quote all over the place (though it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it passage in the original). But individuals need much more than protection from violence!

Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • loveofallwisdom on Is the problem in our heads?
  • Is the problem in our heads? – The Indian Philosophy Blog on Is the problem in our heads?
  • Nathan on Is the problem in our heads?
  • Is the problem in our heads? – The Indian Philosophy Blog on Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation
  • Nathan on Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum Mencius modernity Pali suttas pedagogy Plato rebirth religion S.N. Goenka Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) T.R. (Thill) Raghunath technology theodicy Thomas Aquinas Thomas Kuhn Thomas P. Kasulis United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (11)
  • Applied Phil (240)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (35)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (12)
    • Health (20)
    • Place (21)
    • Play (6)
    • Politics (136)
    • Sex (18)
    • Work (31)
  • Asian Thought (373)
    • Buddhism (268)
      • Early and Theravāda (104)
      • Mahāyāna (112)
      • Modernized Buddhism (79)
    • East Asia (81)
      • Confucianism (51)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (127)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (15)
      • Jainism (23)
      • Modern Hinduism (35)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (13)
      • Vedānta (35)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (24)
  • Indigenous American Thought (2)
  • Method (224)
    • M.T.S.R. (128)
    • Metaphilosophy (150)
  • Practical Philosophy (325)
    • Action (10)
    • Aesthetics (38)
    • Emotion (138)
      • Anger (30)
      • Attachment and Craving (22)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (17)
      • Fear (6)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (46)
      • Hope (14)
      • Pleasure (25)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (44)
    • Flourishing (76)
    • Foundations of Ethics (99)
    • Karma (42)
    • Morality (59)
    • Virtue (136)
      • Courage (3)
      • Generosity (10)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (13)
      • Patient Endurance (27)
      • Self-Discipline (6)
      • Serenity (26)
      • Zest (4)
  • Practice (105)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (29)
    • Monasticism (36)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (13)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (19)
    • Therapy (9)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (314)
    • Consciousness (14)
    • Epistemology (104)
      • Certainty and Doubt (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (26)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (62)
    • Hermeneutics (49)
    • Human Nature (26)
    • Logic (27)
      • Dialectic (15)
    • Metaphysics (86)
    • Philosophy of Language (17)
    • Self (60)
    • Supernatural (48)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (13)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Western Thought (395)
    • Analytic Tradition (89)
    • Christianity (135)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (20)
      • Roman Catholicism (45)
    • French Tradition (46)
    • German Tradition (83)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (103)
      • Epicureanism (23)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (5)
      • Skepticism (1)
      • Sophists (6)
      • Stoicism (17)
    • Islam (35)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (83)
      • Biology (19)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (134)
      • Economics (24)
      • Psychology (54)

Recent Posts

  • Is the problem in our heads?
  • Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation
  • Why philosophy needs history
  • No opposite for the ultimate
  • The reasons for nondualism

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.