Political Philosophy and Good Government brings together two fields that are too often kept apart: the grand tradition of political thought and the urgent practical question of how public power can be exercised with integrity. Structured across twenty thematic units, the book is divided into two complementary halves. The first twelve units set out the foundations of Political Philosophy: the nature of politics, the relationship between ethics and power, reason of state, the limits of State intervention, the Rule of Law, Theories of Justice, the grounds and limits of political obligation, democracy, cultural diversity and minority rights, public opinion and free speech, and global justice. These questions have shaped Western political thought from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Mill to Rawls, Dworkin and their contemporaries. The second half turns to good government: to what goes wrong when power forgets its purpose. Units on corruption, ethics and deontology, corruption in public administration, judicial integrity, the relationship between politics and finance, clientelism, lobbying, democratic accountability and transparency complete the picture. The move from classical theory to contemporary pathology is deliberate. Corruption is not a marginal phenomenon; it is one of the defining challenges of contemporary democracy. Political Philosophy, the author argues, must provide the conceptual tools needed to understand it, name it and fight it.
