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> The Relevance of Political Thought to Contemporary Global Challenges

JYAN Blog

e Relevance of Political ought to

Contemporary Global Challenges
By: Natasha Vincent

December 20, 2019

I write this post as a follow-up to my first post titled “An Uncomfortable but Pertinent
Introspection into Privilege.” During my first eight-week term at Oxford, I took the
Advanced Paper in Theories of Justice as one of my two tutorials for the term. The
bespoke course, typically taken by philosophy and/or politics undergraduates, aimed
to examine the principles of justice as established by philosophers such as John Rawls.
Each week, we examined how these principles applied to different themes and various
groups of individuals, from the disabled to future generations.
Academic learning at the undergraduate level at Oxford entails much more individual
learning than at Georgetown. I don’t have structured classes here per se, but instead, I
have one tutorial a week for each of my two courses in the term. For each tutorial, I had
to produce an essay of around 2,000 words, and I spent most of my time reading
books and journal articles, delving into different arguments before writing my essay.

Spending most of my time reading required a lot of discipline to stay focused and, more
often than not, my mind drifted off to other passing thoughts. A recurring one, however,
was wondering why I was studying the theoretical aspects of justice, which then led to a
sort of frustration upon a superficial realization that this would have limited utility in real-
world policy. My reasoning went something like this: “If politicians neither quote Rawls
nor appeal to his principles of justice when dealing with injustice, then what use is this
stuff, really?”

Then came the tutorial in which my tutorial partner and I went to our tutor’s room at
Balliol College, one of Oxford’s oldest colleges. There, our essays for each tutorial were
critiqued and our tutor pushed us to probe deeper. I felt somewhat uncomfortable sitting
in this room at Balliol which had an old charm to it, discussing these principles of justice
without focusing much on their application to contemporary politics. I subconsciously put
a limit on how much effort I put into truly understanding justice through the lens of
philosophy. Simply put, if these principles of an ideal society did not apply in the real
world, I was not buying it.

Admittedly, I lost interest in the tutorial for a good three weeks. In an effort to save
myself from further embarrassment, I started reading about the methodology behind
political philosophy and began to realize how relevant the field actually is to the real
world. Political philosophy offers normative insights on what government should be and
how we can apply those principles to create a just society. Just because a chasm exists
between political philosophy and actual politics does not mean that political thought
exists in its own bubble or that it should be relegated to the past.

Another of my initial critiques is that political philosophers hail from predominantly

privileged, western European backgrounds. The discipline also has inherent institutional
and cultural biases, but to dismiss it by virtue of not being entirely representative of
global demographics and inclusive of other cultures does not change the status quo; it
simply neglects the fact that there is a rich body of scholarship that can be adapted to
today’s context.

I say this as a person of color. One of the themes we discussed was colonialism; my
ancestors from India certainly encountered historic injustices during the age of the British
Empire, but I do think that we need some nuance when discussing postcolonialism. Too
often, postcolonial dialogue engages in an oversimplification and a generalized
condemnation of “white people,” without critically analyzing the intricacies of history—
which instead gives way to the popular rhetoric of contemporary social movements in
postcolonial societies that fails to achieve institutional reform.

Things changed for the better after I had a more positive outlook on the tutorial, and I
began to truly enjoy what I was studying. I am intrigued to integrate these philosophical
insights to my next tutorials at Oxford and my courses during my senior year at
Georgetown—in the hopes of learning more about how the gap between political
theory and actual politics isn’t as far as we think it is.

About the Author

Natasha Vincent
 Natasha Vincent (SFS'21) graduated from the School of
Foreign Service in Qatar in 2021, with a major in
international politics and a minor in Arabic. Natasha
studied at St. Catherine's College in Oxford for the
2019-2020 academic year and shared her insights on
British culture through the Junior Year Abroad Network.

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