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History of political thoughtFrom Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium Contents[hide] * 1 Ancient Greece * 2 Ancient Rome * 3 Medieval Christianity and Islam * 4 Rise of the nation state * 5 Enlightenment * 6 Revolution * 7 Representative government * 8 Political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries * 8.1 Overview * 8.2 Liberalism * 8.3 Conservatism* 8.4 Socialism * 8.5 Fascism * 8.6 Sharia * 9 International relations * 9.1 Overview * 9.2 Global interdependence * 9.3 Responsibility to protect * 9.4 Unresolved issues * 10 Notes and references |

Among the many contributions to political philosophy, a continuous thread can be traced from the analytical theorising of the thinkers of Ancient Greece throughthe writings of the philosophers of The Enlightenment and the teachings of the founders of the French and American revolutions, to the current ideologies of Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism and their offshoots. There were significant developments in political thinking in China and India during that period, but since they had little influence on that thread, they are conventionally omitted fromcourses and treatises on the history of political thought, and are usually given separate treatment elsewhere. Among the topics that are debated throughout what is regarded as the mainstream thread, are the relations between individual and community, and between community and state. Although many issues remained unresolved, an unprecedented degree of ideological convergence began to develop duringthe latter decades of the 20th century, culminating in a situation that Francis Fukuyama dramatised as "the end of history". However a controversy gathered strength in the 21st century concerning a state's "duty of care" toward its citizens, and the rôle of the international community when an individual state fails to discharge that duty.Ancient Greece The thread begins in Ancient Greece afterthinkers such as Thales and Anaximander had moved, away from a passive acceptance of the anecdotes and superstitions of the time of Homer, toward an active conviction that an understanding of the world could be gained by rational enquiry. Their enquiries came to include the examinations of the advantages of social cooperation that culminated in the political debates of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle inthe 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the course of those debates, they developed a political vocabulary and a taxonomy of political systems that have survived to the present day. The thread centres on the city-state (polis)) of Ancient Athens at a time when an assembly of all of its citizens had been made its legislative body: a body to which its magistrates and administrators were made responsible.That was the form of democracy that was praised by the Athenian aristocrat Pericles in his famous funeral speech. At the time of Plato's political commentaries, Athenian democracy had made some regrettable decisions[1], and lost a war[2] against Sparta and its allies, but had survived as the first fully-functional democratic city-state. Plato considered Athenian democracy to be an imperfectsociety because it put power in the hands of those who were ill-qualified to exercise it. Ruling was, in his view, a specialised skill that required unusual intelligence and self-discipline. Much of the Socratic dialogue in The Republic[3] is concerned with the selection and training of an elite body of "Guardians" who would be given the duty of taking decisions that they deem to benefit the community.To gain their popular acceptance, he suggested the use of a public relations campaign to persuade the populace to believe the "Noble Lie" that the powers of the guardians had been divinely bestowed. Plato's pupil, Aristotle disagreed. He regarded Plato's Republic as the negation of politics, arguing that "man is by nature a political animal" that cannot reach its full potential without reasoned...