Political Ideologies and Human Nature
Foundations: Ideology and Human Nature
Ideology
| Robin Celikates and Sally Haslanger | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2025
Examines ideology as a system of ideas that interprets human behavior, social institutions, power, and political possibilities.
Human Nature
| Neil Roughley | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2021
Explores competing definitions of human nature and whether biological or psychological traits limit possible political arrangements.
Political Legitimacy
| Fabienne Peter | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Investigates why people should obey governments and how consent, justice, democracy, and public reason can legitimize political authority.
Political Obligation
| A. John Simmons | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Reviews philosophical arguments concerning obedience, consent, fairness, gratitude, and membership in political communities.
Social Institutions
| Seumas Miller | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Examines how shared beliefs, human agency, cooperation, and power create and sustain institutions such as governments and markets.
Civic Education
| Jack Crittenden and Peter Levine | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Discusses whether citizenship, tolerance, cooperation, and democratic character arise naturally or must be cultivated through education.
Political Representation
| Suzanne Dovi | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2006
Explores how human interests, identities, judgments, and inequalities shape relationships between political representatives and citizens.
Authority
| Tom Christiano | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2004
Considers whether human beings possess moral duties to obey authority and what characteristics make political commands legitimate.
Law and Ideology
| Christine Sypnowich | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2001
Explains how ideological assumptions about people, society, and power influence legal systems and interpretations of justice.
Political Philosophy: Methodology
| Alexander Moseley | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Introduces political philosophy through questions about sociability, morality, freedom, authority, and the kind of life appropriate for human beings.
Classical and Social-Contract Perspectives
Ancient Political Philosophy
| Melissa Lane | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Surveys Greek arguments about reason, virtue, citizenship, justice, and the idea that humans are naturally political animals.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
| Christopher Bertram | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Explores Rousseau’s belief that humans are naturally compassionate but transformed by property, inequality, dependence, and social institutions.
Locke’s Political Philosophy
| Eric Mack | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2005
Examines how Locke derives limited government from natural freedom, equality, self-ownership, and duties toward other human beings.
Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic
| Eric Brown | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Examines Plato’s comparison between the human soul and the political community, including the roles of reason, appetite, and social order.
Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy
| Sharon A. Lloyd and Susanne Sreedhar | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Explains how fear, equality of vulnerability, competition, and rational self-preservation support Hobbes’s argument for sovereign authority.
John Locke
| William Uzgalis | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2001
Surveys Locke’s account of reason, natural rights, property, religious toleration, government by consent, and resistance to tyranny.
Aristotle’s Political Theory
| Fred Miller | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 1998
Explains Aristotle’s view that political association develops from human sociability and enables people to pursue virtue and flourishing.
Niccolò Machiavelli
| Erica Benner | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Describes Machiavelli’s understanding of people as acquisitive, ambitious, changeable, and strongly influenced by necessity and political circumstances.
Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy
| Sharon A. Lloyd and Susanne Sreedhar | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Connects Hobbes’s political theory to a view of humans as vulnerable, competitive, self-interested, rational, and capable of cooperation.
Social Contract Theory
| Celeste Friend | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Compares Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, and critics who use hypothetical human conditions to explain political authority and obligation.
Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Individualism
Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy
| John Christman | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Examines the liberal assumption that people can reflect upon, revise, and take responsibility for their values and choices.
Positive and Negative Liberty
| Ian Carter | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Contrasts freedom from external interference with freedom understood as self-mastery, autonomy, development, or collective control.
John Stuart Mill
| Fred Wilson | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Reviews Mill’s arguments for liberty, individuality, representative government, education, and the progressive development of human capacities.
Libertarianism
| Bas van der Vossen | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Surveys theories that give strong priority to individual liberty, voluntary exchange, private property, and personal responsibility.
Paternalism
| Gerald Dworkin | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Investigates when governments may restrict freedom for a person’s own welfare and what paternalism assumes about judgment and rationality.
Privacy
| Judith DeCew | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Considers privacy as a condition of individuality, autonomy, intimate association, dignity, and protection from political or social control.
Freedom of Speech
| David van Mill | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Examines arguments based on autonomy, truth-seeking, democracy, human fallibility, harm, tolerance, and distrust of censorship.
Liberalism
| Gerald Gaus, Shane D. Courtland and David Schmidtz | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 1996
Surveys liberal theories built around freedom, individuality, equality, toleration, limited authority, and confidence in human reason.
Individualism in Classical Chinese Thought
| Erica Brindley | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Shows that debates about individual fulfillment, social roles, authority, and human development extend beyond Western liberal traditions.
Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy
| Eric Mack | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Explains Nozick’s defense of individual rights and the minimal state based on self-ownership and restrictions on coercing human beings.
Conservatism, Tradition, and Human Imperfection
Michael Oakeshott
| Terry Nardin | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2020
Presents a conservative view of politics as a practical activity shaped by experience rather than a project for remaking humanity.
Conservatism
| Andy Hamilton | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2015
Explains conservative skepticism toward human perfectibility, abstract reason, rapid social transformation, and utopian political projects.
Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology
| John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Alford | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | 2014
Argues that ideological differences may partly reflect contrasting sensitivity to danger, disorder, loss, and other negative environmental stimuli.
The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives
| Dana R. Carney, John T. Jost, Samuel D. Gosling and Jeff Potter | Political Psychology | 2008
Reports behavioral and environmental differences associated with liberal and conservative personalities, preferences, and everyday lives.
Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?
| Jaime L. Napier and John T. Jost | Psychological Science | 2008
Examines whether acceptance of inequality and rationalization of existing social arrangements help explain ideological differences in reported happiness.
Political Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in 28 Eastern and Western European Countries
| Alain Van Hiel, Mario Pandelaere and Bart Duriez | Political Psychology | 2007
Investigates how psychological traits and social conditions influence conservative identification across diverse national settings.
David Hume’s Moral Philosophy
| Rachel Cohon | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2004
Explores Hume’s view that passions, sympathy, habit, convention, and utility matter more to morality and politics than pure reason.
Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition
Reviews evidence connecting conservatism with needs to manage uncertainty, threat, order, stability, and resistance to disruptive change.
Edmund Burke
| William F. Byrne | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Reviews Burke’s belief that inherited institutions and traditions contain accumulated knowledge that individual reason cannot easily replace.
Tradition
| Mark Bevir | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Examines how inherited practices and beliefs influence human judgment, identity, belonging, and resistance to political change.
Socialism, Marxism, and Human Development
Communism
| Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors | Encyclopaedia Britannica | 2025
Introduces communist theories of common ownership, class abolition, social cooperation, historical development, and transformation of human relationships.
Critical Theory
| Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2023
Surveys theories of domination, emancipation, alienation, ideology, social transformation, and the human capacity for reflective freedom.
Socialism
| Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2019
Surveys socialist arguments about cooperation, equality, freedom, community, exploitation, and democratic control over economic life.
Alienation
| David Leopold | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2018
Examines estrangement from work, other people, society, political power, and oneself in Marxist and contemporary social theory.
Exploitation
| Matt Zwolinski and Alan Wertheimer | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2017
Investigates when social and economic relationships unfairly use human vulnerability, labor, dependence, or unequal bargaining power.
Herbert Marcuse
| Arnold Farr | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2013
Examines Marcuse’s effort to recover human creativity, liberation, and critical consciousness from capitalist conformity and technological domination.
G. A. Cohen
| Nicholas Vrousalis | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2013
Reviews analytical Marxist arguments about equality, freedom, incentives, community, self-ownership, and the moral requirements of socialism.
Karl Marx
| Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Explores Marx’s ideas about alienation, productive activity, class, historical change, capitalism, communism, and human flourishing.
Marx’s Theory of Human Nature
| Erich Fromm | Marx’s Concept of Man | 1961
Explains Marx’s conception of people as active, creative, social beings whose capacities can be distorted by alienated labor.
Antonio Gramsci
| Martin Clark | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Explores cultural hegemony, consent, education, intellectual leadership, and the ways political orders shape ordinary human consciousness.
Foundations: Ideology and Human Nature
Ideology
| Robin Celikates and Sally Haslanger | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2025
Examines ideology as a system of ideas that interprets human behavior, social institutions, power, and political possibilities.
Human Nature
| Neil Roughley | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2021
Explores competing definitions of human nature and whether biological or psychological traits limit possible political arrangements.
Political Legitimacy
| Fabienne Peter | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Investigates why people should obey governments and how consent, justice, democracy, and public reason can legitimize political authority.
Political Obligation
| A. John Simmons | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Reviews philosophical arguments concerning obedience, consent, fairness, gratitude, and membership in political communities.
Social Institutions
| Seumas Miller | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Examines how shared beliefs, human agency, cooperation, and power create and sustain institutions such as governments and markets.
Civic Education
| Jack Crittenden and Peter Levine | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2007
Discusses whether citizenship, tolerance, cooperation, and democratic character arise naturally or must be cultivated through education.
Political Representation
| Suzanne Dovi | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2006
Explores how human interests, identities, judgments, and inequalities shape relationships between political representatives and citizens.
Authority
| Tom Christiano | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2004
Considers whether human beings possess moral duties to obey authority and what characteristics make political commands legitimate.
Law and Ideology
| Christine Sypnowich | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2001
Explains how ideological assumptions about people, society, and power influence legal systems and interpretations of justice.
Political Philosophy: Methodology
| Alexander Moseley | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Introduces political philosophy through questions about sociability, morality, freedom, authority, and the kind of life appropriate for human beings.
Classical and Social-Contract Perspectives
Ancient Political Philosophy
| Melissa Lane | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Surveys Greek arguments about reason, virtue, citizenship, justice, and the idea that humans are naturally political animals.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
| Christopher Bertram | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2010
Explores Rousseau’s belief that humans are naturally compassionate but transformed by property, inequality, dependence, and social institutions.
Locke’s Political Philosophy
| Eric Mack | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2005
Examines how Locke derives limited government from natural freedom, equality, self-ownership, and duties toward other human beings.
Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic
| Eric Brown | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Examines Plato’s comparison between the human soul and the political community, including the roles of reason, appetite, and social order.
Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy
| Sharon A. Lloyd and Susanne Sreedhar | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Explains how fear, equality of vulnerability, competition, and rational self-preservation support Hobbes’s argument for sovereign authority.
John Locke
| William Uzgalis | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2001
Surveys Locke’s account of reason, natural rights, property, religious toleration, government by consent, and resistance to tyranny.
Aristotle’s Political Theory
| Fred Miller | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 1998
Explains Aristotle’s view that political association develops from human sociability and enables people to pursue virtue and flourishing.
Niccolò Machiavelli
| Erica Benner | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Describes Machiavelli’s understanding of people as acquisitive, ambitious, changeable, and strongly influenced by necessity and political circumstances.
Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy
| Sharon A. Lloyd and Susanne Sreedhar | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Connects Hobbes’s political theory to a view of humans as vulnerable, competitive, self-interested, rational, and capable of cooperation.
Social Contract Theory
| Celeste Friend | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Compares Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, and critics who use hypothetical human conditions to explain political authority and obligation.
Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Individualism
Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy
| John Christman | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Examines the liberal assumption that people can reflect upon, revise, and take responsibility for their values and choices.
Positive and Negative Liberty
| Ian Carter | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Contrasts freedom from external interference with freedom understood as self-mastery, autonomy, development, or collective control.
John Stuart Mill
| Fred Wilson | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Reviews Mill’s arguments for liberty, individuality, representative government, education, and the progressive development of human capacities.
Libertarianism
| Bas van der Vossen | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Surveys theories that give strong priority to individual liberty, voluntary exchange, private property, and personal responsibility.
Paternalism
| Gerald Dworkin | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Investigates when governments may restrict freedom for a person’s own welfare and what paternalism assumes about judgment and rationality.
Privacy
| Judith DeCew | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Considers privacy as a condition of individuality, autonomy, intimate association, dignity, and protection from political or social control.
Freedom of Speech
| David van Mill | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2002
Examines arguments based on autonomy, truth-seeking, democracy, human fallibility, harm, tolerance, and distrust of censorship.
Liberalism
| Gerald Gaus, Shane D. Courtland and David Schmidtz | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 1996
Surveys liberal theories built around freedom, individuality, equality, toleration, limited authority, and confidence in human reason.
Individualism in Classical Chinese Thought
| Erica Brindley | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Shows that debates about individual fulfillment, social roles, authority, and human development extend beyond Western liberal traditions.
Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy
| Eric Mack | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Explains Nozick’s defense of individual rights and the minimal state based on self-ownership and restrictions on coercing human beings.
Conservatism, Tradition, and Human Imperfection
Michael Oakeshott
| Terry Nardin | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2020
Presents a conservative view of politics as a practical activity shaped by experience rather than a project for remaking humanity.
Conservatism
| Andy Hamilton | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2015
Explains conservative skepticism toward human perfectibility, abstract reason, rapid social transformation, and utopian political projects.
Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology
| John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Alford | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | 2014
Argues that ideological differences may partly reflect contrasting sensitivity to danger, disorder, loss, and other negative environmental stimuli.
The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives
| Dana R. Carney, John T. Jost, Samuel D. Gosling and Jeff Potter | Political Psychology | 2008
Reports behavioral and environmental differences associated with liberal and conservative personalities, preferences, and everyday lives.
Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?
| Jaime L. Napier and John T. Jost | Psychological Science | 2008
Examines whether acceptance of inequality and rationalization of existing social arrangements help explain ideological differences in reported happiness.
Political Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in 28 Eastern and Western European Countries
| Alain Van Hiel, Mario Pandelaere and Bart Duriez | Political Psychology | 2007
Investigates how psychological traits and social conditions influence conservative identification across diverse national settings.
David Hume’s Moral Philosophy
| Rachel Cohon | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2004
Explores Hume’s view that passions, sympathy, habit, convention, and utility matter more to morality and politics than pure reason.
Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition
Reviews evidence connecting conservatism with needs to manage uncertainty, threat, order, stability, and resistance to disruptive change.
Edmund Burke
| William F. Byrne | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Reviews Burke’s belief that inherited institutions and traditions contain accumulated knowledge that individual reason cannot easily replace.
Tradition
| Mark Bevir | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Examines how inherited practices and beliefs influence human judgment, identity, belonging, and resistance to political change.
Socialism, Marxism, and Human Development
Communism
| Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors | Encyclopaedia Britannica | 2025
Introduces communist theories of common ownership, class abolition, social cooperation, historical development, and transformation of human relationships.
Critical Theory
| Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2023
Surveys theories of domination, emancipation, alienation, ideology, social transformation, and the human capacity for reflective freedom.
Socialism
| Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2019
Surveys socialist arguments about cooperation, equality, freedom, community, exploitation, and democratic control over economic life.
Alienation
| David Leopold | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2018
Examines estrangement from work, other people, society, political power, and oneself in Marxist and contemporary social theory.
Exploitation
| Matt Zwolinski and Alan Wertheimer | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2017
Investigates when social and economic relationships unfairly use human vulnerability, labor, dependence, or unequal bargaining power.
Herbert Marcuse
| Arnold Farr | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2013
Examines Marcuse’s effort to recover human creativity, liberation, and critical consciousness from capitalist conformity and technological domination.
G. A. Cohen
| Nicholas Vrousalis | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2013
Reviews analytical Marxist arguments about equality, freedom, incentives, community, self-ownership, and the moral requirements of socialism.
Karl Marx
| Jonathan Wolff and David Leopold | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | 2003
Explores Marx’s ideas about alienation, productive activity, class, historical change, capitalism, communism, and human flourishing.
Marx’s Theory of Human Nature
| Erich Fromm | Marx’s Concept of Man | 1961
Explains Marx’s conception of people as active, creative, social beings whose capacities can be distorted by alienated labor.
Antonio Gramsci
| Martin Clark | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | n.d.
Explores cultural hegemony, consent, education, intellectual leadership, and the ways political orders shape ordinary human consciousness.
