# Political Philosophy Hub The `/Foundations/` shelf documents the **machinery** of politics — regime types, founding concepts, the federal government, power theory. The `/Subjects/Philosophy/` shelf documents the **ideas** — the branches, traditions, and thinkers of the [[Western canon]]. This hub is the bridge: it maps which philosophy underwrites which machinery, so that a reader standing on either shelf can cross to the other. Sibling bridges: [[Power Theory]] (how power operates), [[Foundations Concepts]] (the principles under attack), and — for the politics of the philosophy itself — [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]. ## Regime types and their philosophers Each entry in `/Foundations/Types of Government/` has a philosophical pedigree; the regime pages carry the mechanics, these links carry the ideas: - [[Democracy]] — defended by [[Contractarianism]] ([[John Locke]], [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]) and by [[John Stuart Mill]]; attacked from antiquity onward by [[Plato]] (the *[[The Republic]]* critique of mob rule), a lineage running directly to [[Neoreaction]]. The [[Epistemology]] war over expertise vs. common sense is a democracy fight in disguise. - [[Republic]] — the mixed-constitution tradition of [[Aristotle]], [[Cicero]], and [[Niccolò Machiavelli]]'s *Discourses*; the Founders' explicit inheritance, carried through [[Montesquieu]]. - [[Monarchy]] — classically justified by divine right (the position [[John Locke]]'s *[[Two Treatises of Government]]* demolished) and by [[Thomas Hobbes]]'s absolutist [[Contractarianism]]; revived in ironic-but-serious form by [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s CEO-monarch. - [[Theocracy]] — the maximal application of [[Thomism]] and [[Natural Law]]; the contemporary ambition of [[Integralism]] and the outer edge of [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]]. Pairs with the [[Philosophy of Religion]] branch and `/Foundations/Religions/`. - [[Totalitarianism]] — diagnosed philosophically by [[Hannah Arendt]] and [[Karl Popper]]; its 20th-century intellectual servants include [[Carl Schmitt]] (the Nazi jurist) and [[Martin Heidegger]] (the Nazi rector); [[Eric Voegelin]] read it as political gnosticism. - [[Authoritarianism (Government Type)]] — theorized admiringly by [[Carl Schmitt]] (sovereignty as deciding the exception) and forecast by [[Oswald Spengler]] as [[Caesarism]]; see the [[Philosophy of History]] branch for the decline-then-strongman script. - [[Oligarchy]] and [[Plutocracy]] — named and classified by [[Plato]] and [[Aristotle]], whose regime-cycle analysis (aristocracy decays into oligarchy, oligarchy provokes democracy, democracy collapses into tyranny) remains the vault's oldest analytical template. - [[Technocracy]] — the rule-by-competence ideal whose ancestor is [[Plato]]'s philosopher-king and whose contemporary form is [[Neoreaction]]'s governance-as-engineering; [[Michael Oakeshott]]'s critique of rationalism in politics is the conservative rebuttal. - [[Communism]] and [[Socialism]] — philosophically grounded in [[Karl Marx]] (downstream of [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]] — see [[German Idealism]]); the right's counter-canon runs through [[Friedrich Hayek]] and [[Karl Popper]]. - [[Dictatorship]] — the modern theory is [[Carl Schmitt]]'s: the commissarial dictator who suspends the constitution to save it, and the sovereign dictator who replaces it. [[Caesarism]] is the personalist variant. - [[Anarchy]] — the stateless pole; its right-libertarian variant (anarcho-capitalism) descends from [[Murray Rothbard]] out of the Austrian tradition. ## Founding concepts and their traditions The `/Foundations/` concept shelf (navigated by [[Foundations Concepts]]) is applied political philosophy. The mapping: - [[Social Contract Theory]] (the civic concept) ← the academic tradition lives at [[Contractarianism]]: [[Thomas Hobbes]], [[John Locke]], [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], [[John Rawls]]. - [[Consent of the Governed]] and [[Popular Sovereignty]] ← [[John Locke]] and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] respectively; the operational core of [[Contractarianism]]. - [[Natural Rights]] ← the secularized wing of [[Natural Law]] ([[Hugo Grotius]] → [[John Locke]]); the theological wing ([[Thomas Aquinas]], [[Thomism]]) grounds the religious right's rival reading. - [[Separation of Powers]] and [[Checks and Balances]] ← [[Montesquieu]]'s *[[The Spirit of the Laws]]*, built on the mixed-regime analysis of [[Aristotle]] and [[Cicero]]. - [[The Harm Principle]] ← [[John Stuart Mill]]'s *[[On Liberty]]*; the liberal boundary-stone the vault uses to measure selective applications of "liberty." ## The attack map (which philosophy is aimed at which foundation) The right's intellectual project, read through this bridge: - [[Carl Schmitt]]'s decisionism → against [[Separation of Powers]], [[Checks and Balances]], and proceduralism generally (the unitary-executive and emergency-powers arguments). - [[Neoreaction]] / [[Curtis Yarvin]] → against [[Consent of the Governed]] and [[Democracy]] as such; for the CEO-monarch ([[Monarchy]] revived). - [[Integralism]] and [[Thomism]] maximalism → against [[Popular Sovereignty]] (authority descends from God, not the people); toward [[Theocracy]]. - [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] ([[Patrick Deneen]], via [[Alasdair MacIntyre]]) → against the [[Contractarianism]] picture of the unencumbered choosing self that underlies [[Social Contract Theory]] and [[Natural Rights]]. - [[Oswald Spengler]] and the [[Philosophy of History]] declinists → against constitutional patience itself: if the West is in terminal decline, the [[Caesarism]] shortcut becomes thinkable. - [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] (as appropriated — see [[Nietzscheanism]]) → against the egalitarian premise beneath all of the above. For the full politics-of-philosophy treatment, see [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]; for the discipline on its own terms, start at [[Philosophy]] and the [[Political Philosophy]] branch. ## Primary works in political philosophy The texts themselves — the primary sources that the regime types, founding concepts, and attack lines above all ultimately refer back to: - [[An Essay Concerning Human Understanding]] — [[John Locke]]'s 1689 epistemological treatise that destroyed the philosophical basis for innate authority and established the blank-slate foundation on which [[Contractarianism]], [[Natural Rights]], and the entire liberal constitutional order were built. The epistemology that makes [[Democracy]] philosophically possible. - [[Of Faction]] — Francis Bacon's essay on factional politics (1612/1625), diagnosing how organized minorities capture institutions, how coalitions fracture once their common enemy is destroyed, and how faction creates loyalties that supersede loyalty to the sovereign or the state. The earliest clear-eyed analysis of the dynamics that [[Federalist No. 10]] later addressed through constitutional design and that this vault tracks in contemporary form as [[Polarization]] and [[Tribal Epistemology]]. ## Sibling hubs - [[Power Theory]] — analytical frameworks for how power operates (45 thinkers) - [[Foundations Concepts]] — the political-philosophy principles the right attacks - [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] — how the right instrumentalizes the canon - [[Philosophy]] — the subject hub ([[Political Philosophy]] is its load-bearing branch) - [[Federal Government]] — the machinery these ideas built