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.