Power
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
Can it be right to disobey the law?
Any law may one day clash with conscience: an iniquitous decree, an order one cannot follow without betraying oneself. To obey nonetheless is to protect what makes common life possible; to disobey is to affirm that above the laws there is something else, at the risk that each person will follow only their own judgment. From Antigone to the great disobediences of history, the question returns with each generation. To take a position is to say what we owe the law when it commands what conscience refuses.
Can violence be legitimate?
In the face of aggression, injustice, and oppression, resort to force always ends up presenting itself, as a temptation or a necessity. Refusing all violence on principle, admitting it as a last resort under strict rules, treating it as the ordinary instrument of politics, or seeing in it the oppressed's path to liberation: each answer commits a conception of morality, power, and history.
Is a political authority that commands and coerces necessary, or should we free ourselves from it?
It all turns on what we expect of human beings left to themselves: able to order their own affairs, or bound for disorder without a power to settle disputes. To take a position is to set how far the duty to obey extends, and where the right to refuse begins.
Does society rest on an agreement between individuals, or on a community that precedes them?
If society arises from an agreement among individuals, we can renegotiate it, leave it, remake it as we wish; if a community precedes us, we are born caught in bonds and duties we never chose. To take a position is to say whether we belong to a society by consent or by birth.
Do political decisions belong to everyone, or first to the most competent?
Giving everyone an equal voice can hand grave choices to ignorance or passion; reserving power for the most knowledgeable can hide the interests of the powerful behind "expertise" and strip people of a say over their own lives. To take a position is to say where the legitimacy to decide comes from: the equality of all, or the competence of a few.