Philosophy has well-developed theories and discussions about the foundations of government — the moral principles that underlie the legitimacy of government; the nature of rights and duties of citizens; the limits of government authority; and so on for a large number of issues. This discipline is called social and political philosophy, and it has a lineage that extends back to the ancient Greek philosophers, through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Mill, and into the twentieth century in the writings of people like Rawls, Habermas, van Parijs, and Nozick.
What does not yet exist is a discipline that treats the workings of government itself as a philosophical subject. How do governments, as extended social entities, perform the functions we attribute to them — knowledge gathering, belief formation, policy and priority setting, legislation, regulation, and enforcement? Governments are not unified entities; they are extended networks of agencies, organizations, alliances, interests, and actors, and it is worth careful philosophical investigation to consider how this kind of entity can be purposive, intentional, and calculating.
This blog focuses on issues about causation, order, and dysfunction within government, through attention to the actors, institutions, and organizations that constitute it. Think of the blog as a philosophy of public policy and public administration.
The topics of dysfunction and partial functionality run throughout these discussions — not because government is an especially defective kind of social organization, but because all extended social collectivities confront the sources of dysfunction mentioned throughout these posts. Principal-agent problems, conflicts of interest within individuals and between groups of individuals, multiple understandings of the setting of organizational action and the means that are available, conflicting priorities across agencies and groups involved in coordinated activity — all of these features of social “friction” are to be found within government, as they are within all kinds of large social collectivities.
A Philosophy of Government 