Western Political Thought: A Critical Study from a Marxist Framework

Abstract

Western political thought constitutes a vast intellectual tradition spanning from ancient Greece to contemporary liberal and post-liberal theory. It is commonly presented as a progressive unfolding of rational ideas concerning justice, the state, sovereignty, citizenship, liberty, and democracy. However, from a Marxist standpoint, political thought is not an autonomous realm of abstract reasoning but a historically conditioned superstructural formation shaped by material relations of production and class struggle. This paper offers a detailed and critical examination of Western political thought through the framework of Marxism, drawing upon the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and extending the analysis through later Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, and Ralph Miliband.

The paper argues that Western political theory has functioned historically as an ideological expression of dominant class interests corresponding to successive modes of production—slave society, feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism—while also containing internal contradictions that give rise to emancipatory possibilities. By situating canonical thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G W F Hegel, and modern liberal theorists within their socio-economic contexts, this study demonstrates how political ideas both reflect and reproduce relations of domination.