The Difficulties of Philosophy, History and World Politics
In this dissertation I explore some recent philosophical attempts to address questions related to
global justice and world politics, principally through the work of Amartya Sen and Thomas
Pogge. My discussion focuses on some central intractable puzzles, and I argue that global
justice is best seen as a predicament - an unanswerable, impossible question which cannot be
readily dismissed, but also as a topic of deliberation and contestation which, once predicated,
requires a depth and seriousness of response which confounds conventional disciplinary and
conversational boundaries.
The disciplinary decorum of liberal political philosophy minimises attention to the
historical context of the theorist, along with evidence and interpretive argument about history
and social theory. Writers such as Pogge and Sen have pushed against those constraints,
attempting to develop more empirically informed and practically oriented accounts. However,
I argue that they have underestimated the need for a deeper engagement with history, and for a
more radical challenge to implicit understandings of the character of the world. Without a
more robust engagement with the power-infused politics of the real world, the abstraction of
political philosophy will continue to produce accounts which are inadequate to the dimensions
of domination, the character of human suffering, and the dynamic and strategic character of
normative argument.
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