A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy

But politics and political philosophy have one thing in common, and that is argument. If you listen to the talk shows, you will hear your fellow citizens arguing passionately pro and con with advocacy and denigration, accusation and defense. Politics means taking sides; it is partisan. Not only are there sides—typically liberal and conservative in our day—but also they argue against each other, so that it is liberals versus conservatives.

Socrates did not accept this assumption. He suggested that questions of justice, like those of physics, might admit of answers that are not relative to time or place but are always and everywhere the same. Justice would then not be a matter of convention or nomos, but rather of nature or physis; there

Most people reason badly, but they do reason—and political philosophy starts from that fact.