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This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society.

This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society.

Governance is best analysed using rational choice theory to identify the extent to which different groups can systematically punish and reward others. This is roughly in line with Dowding's important book Rational Choice and Political Power. It is different though in the sense that it does not focus on the measurement of social power, but rather a subset of it. Focusing on the latter avoids difficulties relating to systematic luck, such as distinguishing it from legitimacy and the possession of information, and also clarifies the importance of coordination problems for the analysis.

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim 'meaningless nonsense' from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard solutions for 'clarifying' meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism's underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument.

Unlocking The Census Storehouse For Beginning Undergraduates

AbstractWe propose a two-step method for studying the history of political thought roughly in line with the contextualism of the Cambridge School. It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology. Such accommodation often entails propositions that are inconsistent with even our most cherished political opinions. These bugs can cause political arguments to crash. This reframing takes seriously the importance of theories of meaning in the formative methodological arguments of the Cambridge School and updates the argument in light of new developments. We argue the new orthodoxy of Saul Kripke's causal theory of meaning in the philosophy of language better demonstrates the importance of contextual analysis to modern political theory.