Cohort: POLS 37° 

Topic of the thesis: Justice for Hogs. A quest for the optimal political theory for suboptimal individuals

Abstract: This project is aimed to explore whether it is possible to construct theories of state legitimacy and state function on the basis of an anthropology acknowledging the egoistic nature of human beings. First, I purport to build a psychological sketch of the individual working between the lines of Hobbes’s egoism and Rawls’s moral sense. My suggestion is that both viewpoints tend to paint a naively absolutistic picture of the individual who is admitted to the realm of politics. The individual per se is neither fully lacking any sense of justice nor in possession of an inherent capacity to have it. Rather, it seems much more plausible to contend that human beings are value-laden, intelligent egoists, whose pleasure principle is more refined than Hobbes’s (c.f., constrained maximizer) but not to be ruled out from the start. Thereafter, I wish to examine the two main theories of state legitimacy that have self-interested individuals at their centre: Hobbes’s contractarianism and consent-based anarchism. Though it seems that the two theories are orthogonal to each other, I believe this is a misinterpretation. Both Hobbes and the anarchists construct the political community as a freely-chosen association whose coercive power derives from voluntary individual choices of association and/or submission. Thus, I argue that there is an anarchist element to Hobbes’s picture that has been wrongly kept to IR theory alone while it is in fact embedded in his own theories of state formation and legitimation. The scope of the second part of my thesis is to contend that this anarchist Leviathan is the best political solution to follow from the egoistic anthropological conclusions of the first part as it satisfies the respect for consent that lies at the basis of productive cooperation. Lastly, I wish to devote the third part of my dissertation to the topic of which state should be promoted. Granted that any anarchist, consent-based state is a legitimate one, which legitimate state should we choose at the expense of others? Democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, epistocracy? I do not wish to entertain discussions on single-issue policies, but rather confront the different options for the basic structure of government. My general contention is that there is no single answer to the question of which form of government surpasses the others. Rather, it can be claimed that different governments suit different needs. Still, given certain moral tenets of Western society, I wish to suggest that sortition-based democracy could be a good alternative to both the liberal-democratic status quo and the most promising alternatives to it (e.g., epistocracy).

Research interests: Panarchism; Anarchism; Libertarianism; Hobbes's Political Philosophy; Egoism.

Graduated from: University of Milan (BA); University of Milan (MA).

Degrees obtained: BA in Philosophy; MA in Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs.

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