Philosophy in the Trenches: Political Thought in an Age of Crisis

Recent Developments in Philosophy #8

It’s been far too long since my last post—more than two and a half months, which in Substack years is practically a sabbatical—but I do have a few halfway respectable excuses. First, the machinery of work life decided to cough and sputter at just the wrong times. Then there was the Irish jungle growing around our house, also known as the gravel surround. It turns out that if you spread out a large area of stones in this climate, nature takes it as a personal challenge to outdo the Amazon in weed density. Between that and repainting the house, trimming trees, cleaning gutters, and wrestling our garden back into something that doesn't look post-apocalyptic, my free time started looking more like a rumour than a reality.

And then, of course, came the sports season. Our children have taken up rowing and Gaelic football, and I—somewhat against my more introverted instincts—found myself in the stands more often than in the previous four decades combined. Now, I’m not anti-sport. I enjoy beach soccer and a good workout. But sitting for hours watching others sprint and kick and tackle while I develop a numb backside in the drizzle? That, I find less thrilling. Especially since I can’t properly enjoy watching a game unless I’ve emotionally chosen sides, and once I’ve done that, I’m hostage to the scoreboard. It’s the same reason I don’t gamble: I’m risk-averse when it comes to recreational disappointment.

To cap it off, our youngest daughter managed to break her nose during one of those Gaelic games—an event that triggered a series of hospital visits several counties away. On the brighter side, May surprised us with Mediterranean temperatures, and we took full advantage of our local beach, which included me spending far more time in the frigid Atlantic than I usually agree to, largely due to small, persuasive voices who consider wet neoprene a lifestyle rather than a deterrent.

There were also other demands—like the joyless bureaucratic pilgrimage to Dublin for new German passports for the kids—but really, none of these things would have stopped me from writing, had I not been lured down a sequence of philosophical rabbit holes. What began as a simple, innocent series on recent developments in philosophy gradually morphed into something else entirely. I made it through metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind in reasonable order, and then—I hit the philosophy of language. That’s where the trouble started.

I began reading and rereading with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated grad student: Austin, Wittgenstein, Searle, Davidson, and then the whole new world of AI and Large Language Models. Before I knew it, my notes outnumbered my hours, and what was supposed to be a neat overview turned into a hydra-headed tangle. The short version? AI is making the philosophy of language newly urgent—and newly fun. But I’ve finally decided to save those excess thoughts for future posts, once I’ve trimmed them down into something that doesn’t frighten small children.

For now, let’s turn the page and move—at long last—into political philosophy.

The Struggle for Meaning in the Age of Politics

In a way, the same thing is happening in political philosophy as in the philosophy of language: an encounter with a world that’s changing faster than our inherited ideas can comfortably handle. So now I want to look at how philosophers have been reckoning with the moral and conceptual mess of our political present—from misinformation to democracy’s cognitive limits, from free speech to the strange new weight of who gets heard.

The past decade or so has not been kind to old certainties. If there was once a lingering assumption that liberal democracy, with its elections, institutions, and free speech principles, would gently spread and eventually prevail—well, that assumption now looks quaint, if not laughable. Between the rise of authoritarian populism, social media echo chambers, the political weaponisation of identity, and the ambient mood of epistemic chaos, political philosophy has found itself dragged into the thick of it. Theory, meet Twitter. Twitter, meet X.

One idea that’s come under fire is epistemic democracy—the hope that democratic processes are not just fair but smart, that collective deliberation can help uncover truth, or at least reach better decisions than individuals alone. But that idea starts to wobble when large swathes of the public reject basic facts or fall prey to conspiracy theories, especially in environments shaped less by reasoned debate than by viral outrage. The spectre of “post-truth” politics isn’t just a media slogan; it’s a philosophical headache. If democracy depends on informed citizens and mutual trust, what happens when neither can be taken for granted?

Enter one of the most controversial counter-proposals of recent years: epistocracy, or “rule by the knowledgeable”. Political philosopher Jason Brennan has argued—deliberately provocatively—that if voters are persistently irrational or misinformed, then perhaps democratic legitimacy doesn’t require equal votes for all. Maybe, he suggests, those who know more should have more say. It’s an idea that touches a raw nerve, especially in societies where democratic equality is held sacred. Critics have called it elitist, technocratic, and blind to the historical struggles for universal suffrage. But at its core, the idea forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: is democratic participation valuable regardless of epistemic competence, or is there a cognitive threshold beneath which it becomes harmful? Brennan, to his credit or infamy, isn’t afraid to poke that bear.

And then there’s the ever-contentious terrain of free speech. The classical liberal tradition—stretching from John Stuart Mill to today’s constitutional defenders—holds that speech should be almost absolutely protected, because even bad ideas must be aired in order to be defeated. But that view, once the default setting in liberal democracies, is now under pressure from newer, more relational conceptions of justice. What if certain speech doesn’t just offend, but actively silences others? What if allowing some people to say anything means others, structurally marginalised, say nothing at all?

This has become especially sharp on university campuses and social media platforms, where “free speech” often collides with calls for inclusion, safety, and accountability. Philosophers are increasingly exploring how Mill’s harm principle—the idea that liberty should only be restricted to prevent harm to others—might apply in an age where “harm” can be psychological, systemic, or even algorithmically amplified. Is it legitimate to deplatform someone who spreads climate denial or race science? Should private platforms act more like neutral public squares or editorially responsible publishers? The debates have shifted from “Should everyone be allowed to speak?” to “Who decides what gets heard, and how, and by whom?”

What’s emerging is a philosophical landscape that feels pulled in several directions at once: towards epistemic standards and the defence of reason, towards procedural fairness and the rights of expression, and towards a more relational view of politics where voice, power, and vulnerability are not abstract variables but embodied realities. There’s tension in every direction, and perhaps rightly so—because the problems we’re facing don’t fit neatly inside any one school of thought. They’re messier than that. And they’re already here.

But the strain isn’t limited to democratic procedures. The very philosophical framework that has underpinned much of Western political thought for the last half-century—liberalism—is under renewed scrutiny. And not just from one side.

Liberalism on Trial

For decades, liberalism—especially in its political-philosophical form, not just as a vague centrist attitude—has been something like the water we all swam in. Its clearest expression in recent memory was John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, a 1970s classic that aimed to show how a fair society could be constructed from rational agreement behind a “veil of ignorance”—a thought experiment where you imagine designing social rules without knowing what place you’ll occupy in that society. Would you still endorse an economic system if you didn’t know whether you’d be born rich or poor, male or female, able-bodied or disabled? The idea is that fairness emerges when self-interest is blunted by uncertainty—when no one can game the system in advance. The thought experiment is elegant, rational, and built around the core liberal idea: protect individual rights, and justice will follow.

But over the past two decades—and accelerating sharply in recent years—critics have been asking whether this model has missed something vital. Liberalism, after all, prides itself on neutrality: it doesn’t tell people what kind of life to live, just that their rights should be protected while they live it. That sounds fair enough. But what if neutrality isn’t neutral? What if the structures of society are already weighted, invisibly, by race, class, or gender, and liberalism’s focus on individual rights just launders those inequalities through polite proceduralism?

That’s the thrust of Charles Mills’s critique. Mills, a philosopher who passed away in 2021, argued that liberal political theory had systematically ignored race—not just as an empirical oversight, but as a conceptual blind spot. His Racial Contract flips the traditional social contract theory on its head: instead of a universal pact of mutual respect, Mills suggests that the real historical contract was between white people, enabling the exploitation and exclusion of others. In his later work, he continued to challenge mainstream liberal theorists for their silence on systemic racial injustice. The problem, he insisted, wasn’t just what liberalism failed to fix—it was what it failed to see.

A similar critique has come from feminist political philosophers. Carole Pateman, for instance, argued in The Sexual Contract (back in 1988) that the supposed “equality” of the social contract was always shadowed by a parallel, unspoken deal: one that reinforced patriarchal power. Liberalism promised freedom in public life, but often rested on unfreedom in the private sphere—marriage, reproduction, domestic labour. Later thinkers have built on this to question whether the very structures liberalism treats as natural—like the division between public and private—are themselves shaped by gendered power.

These aren’t just internal academic debates. They feed into wider public discontent on both the left and the right. On the left, we see renewed calls for economic justice that go beyond what classical liberalism typically offers. Thomas Piketty’s massive tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped revive interest in inequality as a structural feature of capitalism. Political philosophers influenced by neo-Marxist or radical democratic thought argue that liberalism’s focus on formal equality—everyone gets a vote, everyone has rights—can end up legitimising vast material inequalities. If you’re technically free to sleep under a bridge or apply for a job you’ll never get, what does that freedom really amount to?

And then, from the other side, come the critics who think liberalism’s problem isn’t that it’s too blind to inequality, but that it’s too blind to meaning. Thinkers like Patrick Deneen have argued that liberalism, by reducing politics to rights and procedures and individual choice, erodes the traditions, communities, and shared moral frameworks that people actually live by. His book Why Liberalism Failed contends that liberal societies, for all their talk of freedom, often feel atomised and spiritually hollow. It’s not an academic jab—it’s a cultural lament. And it’s found resonance, especially among conservative thinkers who feel that liberal secularism can’t sustain the kind of communal glue that binds societies together.

So is liberalism finished? Not quite. But it’s certainly in the middle of a major identity crisis. Some of its defenders are trying to rebuild it from the inside out. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, for instance, have proposed a capabilities approach—an attempt to move beyond GDP and basic rights, and to ask what people are actually able to do and be. Instead of abstract liberty, they focus on real human empowerment: can you live a life of dignity? Can you develop your talents, care for loved ones, participate in society? It’s liberalism, yes—but with thicker boots and more dirt under the fingernails.

The broader philosophical mood here is one of reckoning. Liberalism, once seen as the natural habitat of rational politics, now finds itself cross-examined: by left-leaning critics who say it hides structural injustice, by right-leaning thinkers who say it forgets culture and tradition, and by generally more centrist thinkers who still believe in it, but want to reimagine it for a world where formal freedom isn’t enough.

So, political philosophy has been rattled by internal tremors—disinformation, the crisis of democracy, the fraying consensus around liberalism. But not all the shaking comes from within. A great deal of contemporary political thought has been drawn outwards, beyond the nation-state, towards questions that are global by nature and urgent by necessity. For instance, by climate change.

Justice Beyond Borders

Climate change has done what few academic arguments could: it has made the abstraction of intergenerational justice feel real. When philosophers used to ask what we owe to future generations, it could feel like a seminar thought experiment. Now it sounds like an awkwardly overdue question at a family dinner: what have we left our children, and who will pay for the damage?

The idea of climate justice has come to the fore as an attempt to think through how the burdens of climate change—and its mitigation—should be distributed. Who should cut their emissions, and by how much? Who gets to keep using fossil fuels a little longer, and who has to stop now? Philosophers have proposed various principles: the polluter pays principle (those who caused the most damage should shoulder the largest burden); the ability to pay principle (the wealthiest countries should do the most); and the equal per capita approach (everyone gets the same carbon budget, no matter where they live). Each of these has its logic—and its complications. Should we really hold today’s citizens of industrialised countries morally responsible for emissions their ancestors made before climate change was understood? What about developing countries that are still industrialising now—do they get a free pass, or just a smaller cut of the carbon pie?

These are not merely technical questions. They reflect deep disagreements about fairness, historical responsibility, and what global justice should look like. And as sea levels rise and heatwaves multiply, the stakes only intensify. Climate justice forces political theory into unfamiliar territory: across time (to future generations), across space (to people we’ll never meet), and across moral instincts (between fairness, equality, and practicality). The idea that justice can stop at the border of a nation looks increasingly thin.

Borders themselves, of course, are under ethical scrutiny. The refugee crises of the past decade—whether due to war, persecution, or climate disasters—have raised pressing questions about the moral legitimacy of national boundaries. Should a state have the right to turn away desperate people simply because they weren’t born inside its lines? Some political philosophers, especially those drawing on cosmopolitan traditions, argue that our moral obligations don’t end at our passport’s edge. If we’re all part of a shared humanity, then borders are at most administrative conveniences—not moral firewalls.

Others push back, emphasising that communities have a right to self-determination—to preserve their culture, their political institutions, their way of life. This doesn’t have to be xenophobic, they argue; it can simply reflect the importance of democratic integrity. A political community has the right to decide who joins it, just as you have the right to decide who gets a key to your house.

The real world, predictably, gives no clean resolution. Philosophical idealism crashes into logistical reality: refugee quotas, legal limbo, overcrowded camps, populist backlash. But the philosophical conversation remains essential. It asks not only what we are doing, but what we should be doing. When people flee burning forests or bombed-out cities, when nations argue over emissions or visas or reparations, political theory has to try to articulate some measure of justice—even if only to expose how far short we fall.

In this sense, the “global turn” in political philosophy is not a trendy pivot—it’s a reluctant reckoning. The problems have outgrown our traditional boundaries, and the language of justice is learning to stretch. What emerges is a more difficult, more demanding vision of politics—one in which moral concern doesn’t stop at the gates of the city, or the borders of the state.

Another area into which political philosophy has been dragged—sometimes kicking and screaming—is the circuitry of the digital world.

Power, Platforms, and Pandemic Ethics

Where earlier generations debated the social contract in the shadow of Hobbes or Rousseau, today’s debates might start with a cookie banner or a predictive algorithm. That shift is more than superficial. The very architecture of power is changing, and political thought is scrambling to keep up.

Consider surveillance capitalism. The phrase, coined by Shoshana Zuboff, describes a world in which our personal data—our searches, our clicks, our location pings—is quietly harvested and turned into behavioural predictions, which are then sold or leveraged for influence. Zuboff is not a philosopher in the traditional sense, but her work has lit a fire under philosophical discussions about autonomy, privacy, and the structure of power in the age of Big Tech. Is this merely a new form of economic exploitation, or something deeper—a kind of coercion by opacity, where the very conditions of consent have been eroded?

Political philosophers are asking whether these new data regimes constitute a form of domination. Not the heavy hand of state censorship, but the subtle subjugation that comes from having one’s actions monitored, nudged, and shaped without transparency or recourse. Autonomy, in this view, is not just about freedom from interference but freedom from being invisibly profiled, ranked, and manipulated by systems you can’t inspect.

Then there’s algorithmic governance—the use of automated systems to make or inform public decisions. It sounds like a bad dystopian script, but it’s already here: predictive policing, automated welfare eligibility checks, AI-assisted bail decisions. Philosophers are digging into the ethical dimensions of these technologies: do they perpetuate bias under a veneer of neutrality? Do they erode accountability by distributing decision-making across code and bureaucracy? The broader question is how to make democracy legible to machines—and, just as importantly, how to ensure machines remain legible to democracy.

A growing field of “digital political philosophy” has begun to take shape around these questions. Some of it draws on classical concerns—justice, fairness, consent—and applies them to new domains. Other strands try to imagine new institutions altogether: algorithmic transparency councils, data trusts, even digital rights charters that would treat personal information as a basic asset of selfhood.

Much of this work is happening beyond the ivory towers, from philosophers who straddle academia and activism—or who don’t particularly care for that distinction in the first place. Think of Cornel West and Angela Davis, whose writing cuts through the abstraction to insist that justice is not merely a theory, but a practice. Or of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose work on identity and cosmopolitanism wrestles with what it means to belong in an increasingly global, yet still deeply divided, world.

And then came the pandemic. COVID-19 wasn’t just a health crisis; it was an epistemic, ethical, and political crisis all at once. Philosophers found themselves reckoning with questions they hadn’t quite expected to become urgent again: How far should the state go to protect public health? What trade-offs are acceptable between liberty and security? What obligations do we owe to strangers in our community, or in distant parts of the world?

Some of the most immediate writing came from blog posts and essays, but it soon coalesced into more sustained reflection. Political Philosophy in a Pandemic (2021) brought together many of these voices, showing how the crisis exposed fault lines—inequality, fragility, mistrust—that had long been papered over. The pandemic, for all its horror, acted as a kind of moral stress test. Many philosophers concluded that we need stronger, more resilient social contracts—ones that can bend under pressure without breaking.

And perhaps that’s the unifying theme here. Political philosophy today is no longer content to remain an ideal theory untouched by turbulence. It has become realist—not in the cold, cynical sense of abandoning ideals, but in the sense of being forced to meet reality where it is. Whether the topic is climate or COVID, algorithms or autocrats, the discipline is trying to stay close to the ground—to the world as it is, in order to say something about the world as it might yet be.