Unitarianism and Pluralism; Two main trends in the history of Political Philosophy

Political systems can be divided into monist and pluralist systems in terms of their inclination towards monism or pluralism. In the field of politics, monism refers to those thoughts which concentrate on the centralization of authority and considers that only the state has the right and decision to rule. On the contrary, pluralism concentrates on the diversity of power resources and on distributing power among the competing groups. Throughout history, these two ideological-political trends have been supported by political philosophers, and each trend offers certain evidence to support its views. Apparently, there may be very few political philosophers whose thought cannot be discussed within the frame of one of these two trends, in spite of the degree of the attachment of each of these thinkers to these trends. However, these two trends can be equally criticized. In fact, these two approaches have gone to extremes, and so they face challenges in thought and practice. With their sound understanding of these challenges, contemporary Muslim philosophers have taken influential steps to eliminate these challenges, make use of the strengths of these two trends and avoid their weaknesses, and introduce the idea of monism along with political plurality.