# Political Philosophy — Branch of Philosophy Political philosophy studies authority, justice, liberty, and the legitimate organization of collective life. It is the branch where philosophy most directly touches the material of this knowledge base. ## Why it matters for this KB This is the load-bearing branch for the Right Wing KB. The major fault lines all run through it: - **[[Contractarianism]]** ([[Thomas Hobbes]], [[John Locke]], [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]) supplies the liberal vocabulary of consent and rights — see also the civic-concept page [[Social Contract Theory]] — that the [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] right now attacks at the root. - **[[Natural Law]]** grounds the religious right's claim that just law answers to a moral order above the state. - **[[Straussianism]]** shaped [[Neoconservatism]] and the [[Claremont Institute]]'s constitutionalism. - **[[Carl Schmitt]]**'s decisionism — politics as friend/enemy, sovereignty as the power to decide the exception — is the most important 20th-century reactionary import, feeding [[Neoreaction]] and authoritarian-right legal theory. - **[[Critical Theory]]** and liberal egalitarianism ([[John Rawls]]) are the foils, while [[Robert Nozick]]'s libertarian rights-theory and [[Patrick Deneen]]'s post-liberal critique mark the internal-right debate. The payoff MOC [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] traces how each of these is deployed in practice; the [[Political Philosophy Hub]] in /Foundations/ maps these traditions onto the regime types and founding concepts they underwrite or attack. ## Relationship to other branches Political philosophy is applied [[Ethics]] at the level of institutions and rests on [[Metaphysics]] (human nature) and [[Epistemology]] (who can know the good). See the [[Philosophy]] hub.