POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Abstract

Around the 5th century BC, Socrates, the great philosopher of the inward life, was accused of corrupting the minds of the youth, and consequently forced to pay the ultimate price with his life. Since then, philosophy, philosophers and students of philosophy have remained the targets of persistent diatribe by some biased scientists and ignorant members of the public. They have been tagged with such disparaging epithets as stargazers, lone-rangers, subversives, corrupters of the social order, good-for-nothing intellectualist, eccentrics, schizophrenics and even paranoids. Consequently, philosophy has been perceived as an arid, atrophied abstraction or a kind of inane thinking without content and purpose. This paper attempts a change in the narrative; hence it demonstrates how philosophic engagement is, and remains a meaningful intellectual enterprise bequeathed to humanity by the ancient Greeks. As an essay in defense of the life of philosophy (apologia pro vita philosophia), the work argues that philosophy is a tutor to both law, politics economy, culture and morality. That means that despite the calumny that philosophy has received in history and continues to receive, specialized philosophy has continued to spread throughout the world as an indispensable tool for social change, cultural and economic development and key to meaningful human existence. This paper is therefore significant because we are in an era where politics and morality are at par with each other; where politics has become something that needs to be detested as virile, corrupt and or better left only to the greedily ambitious. It is an era where morality has dangerously been separated from both law and politics. It is within this context that this paper becomes imperative; hence we critically revisit the value of philosophy in shaping society and bringing about social change in terms of ensuring complete socio-political, cultural and economic development and sound human flourishing.