The Life of Political Philosophy After its Death

This chapter, unlike most of my writings, is concerned with sketching difficulties rather than attempting to resolve them. The subject is the significance of the history of political philosophy for political philosophy, and, hence, the problems it raises for political philosophy.]

Ethical Perspectives, 2016

ethical perspectivesjune 2016 and with considerable insight. Their book would be particularly valuable for students of political philosophy. Curiously both authors operate out of a John Rawlsian perspective. John A. Dick Leuven Andrew Fiala (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 288 pp. This book has an ambitious goal: "[...] to offer an overview of the field [of political philosophy] and the depth of the issues" (2). The collection is aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries, and includes a number of interesting companions: Philosophy of Mind (386 pp.), Philosophy of Science (475 pp.), Continental Philosophy (417 pp.), in addition to Companions to Aristotle (418 pp.), Kant (432 pp.), Hume (447 pp.), etc. Most are very useful and some even mandatory references. Unfortunately, this volume falls short of such an ambition. It certainly does not help that it is by far the shortest in the collection, at little more than 250 pages, considering the pervasive nature of the political problems it faces and the 2500 years during which political philosophy has occupied some of the world's best minds. The volume is composed of a set of fourteen essays, a small glossary (227-254), a brief chronology (223-225) and a suggestion of 'research resources' (255-258). Contrary to expectations, the first essay, on the history of political philosophy, authored by James Alexander, is not an overview of the history of political philosophy, but a mere ten-page discussion of the respective roles of history and theory. The essay arrives at the commonsensical conclusion that "If philosophy without history is a desert, and history without philosophy is a jungle, then we certainly need something of both" (16); that is, in the end, the history of political philosophy "[...] is not political philosophy, but political philosophy is nothing without it" (30). The author, however, takes the rather shallow view that all political philosophy is but an "[...] attempt to respond to the world," so we are not assured of its real perennial philosophical value, except maybe seeing it as predecessor to current political ideas. After serving old masters such as polis, or to empire, church or state, only "[...] in the twentieth century, there were attempts to define politics (or the category of 'the political') as something in itself" (19). If the book begins with the past, the final essays go from contemporary theory to a prediction of future political philosophy. This is part of the design of the Companion series, where the last two essays are supposed to present a vision of the possible future of the subject matter. The last essays are quite original, at least in their basic ideas. Mathew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski "[...] analyze the publication record of six leading journals" (200) over 20 years to offer the informed guess that we should expect more work on global politics (202), inclusion (203) and democratic theory (203-204), the continuing presence of 'the Rawls industry' (204), and some new applied ethical-political problems (gender studies, etc.). Eduardo Mendieta writes the final essay on some of these 'trendy' subjects. 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 350 30/05/16 13:40 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Universidade do Minho: RepositoriUM 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 351 30/05/16 13:40

Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Teaching Philosophy 41:65-115, 2018

While the volume of material inspired by Rawls’s reinvigoration of the discipline back in 1971 has still not begun to subside, its significance has been in serious decline for quite some time. New and important work is appearing less and less frequently, while the scope of the work that is appearing is getting smaller and more internal and its practical applications more difficult to discern. The discipline has reached a point of intellectual stagnation, even as real-world events suggest that the need for what political philosophy can provide could not be more critical. What follows then is a set of statements about how I believe that we, as political philosophers, should approach what we do. It contains my view as to what political philosophy should be about, how political philosophy should be done, and how courses in political philosophy should be taught, interlaced with commentary on the current state of the profession.

History of European Ideas, 2011

The University of Cambridge has long been a centre for the teaching of the history of political thought. 1 In 1873, to meet concerns that the study of history alone might ''exercise too exclusively the memory and receptive imagination of the student'' (at the expense of the higher faculties of abstraction and generalisation), the new Historical Tripos included a number of ''theoretical'' courses taken over from the longer-established degree in Moral Sciences. 2 Among these was a paper in ''Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence'', for which undergraduates read a fairly miscellaneous selection of ten books, from Aristotle's Politics to Maine's Ancient Law via François Guizot, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin. 3 True to the purpose of the paper, these books were read for direct political and philosophical illumination rather than as episodes in intellectual history. 4 It was indeed the view of a series of Cambridge historians in the later nineteenth century-most notably Sir John Seeley and Oscar Browning-that the study of history was properly understood as a foundation for a political science, and that (in Browning's words) ''the Tripos ought to some extent.. .be regarded as a Political Tripos.'' 5 In this conception, Browning was fighting a losing battle even at the end of the nineteenth century, and today the question of how to supplement the learning of history so as to borrow a degree of intellectual rigour from elsewhere has long lost its point. 6 (Nobody now doubts that history is a proper university subject, and accusations of objectionable novelty and intellectual flimsiness have found new targets.) It was a sign of the times when in 1929 ''Political Science A''-essentially a course in the comparative study of political institutions-was replaced by a paper on ''The History of Political Thought''. 7 Political philosophy, originally included in the Tripos as an intellectually bracing addition to mere historical erudition, was now to be treated as itself part of the history to be studied. 8 This approach informed pioneering work by J.G.A. Pocock and Peter Laslett in the 1950s, and theoretical manifestos by Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner in the following decade. 9 Since then, Cambridge has been associated with a distinctive way of studying the history of political thought, in which surviving texts are assigned to past contexts of political circumstance and intellectual practice in order to make possible the recovery of those texts' character as specific ''speech acts'' performed by historical agents. 10 It is an irony that this ''genuinely historical'' view of the history of political thought (to use Quentin Skinner's expression) has its origins in the inclusion of consciously nonhistorical subjects in the Cambridge Historical Tripos. 11 Between undergraduate education and the production of original historical research lies the training of graduate students, and at the graduate level the ''Cambridge School'' has had a pedagogical as well as a scholarly dimension from the outset. 12 It is a sign of the continuing vitality of graduate work in the history of political thought in Cambridge that since 2008 graduate students History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 396-402

e-International Relations (online), 2012

Phenomenology and Mind, 2017

There isn’t an overall consensus on the aim, meaning and role(s) of contemporary political philosophy. The relationship between philosophy and politics has been addressed and sharpened – not just today but in different ways and from various, separate and sometimes conflicting perspectives (Leopold & Stears, 2008). Regardless, the main aims, meaning and role of a field of study are key issues, and the quality and credibility of the research will most likely depend on our capacity to draw a path through this conflicting background. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to drafting elements of a new road map that could lead contemporary political philosophy out of this crippling impasse. It builds on a specific version of political theory – Walzer’s interpretation path reviewed (Walzer, 1985) – and addresses a kind of political practice able to reconcile political philosophy’s normative commitments – as is the case with the Rawls’ four roles of political philosophy (Rawls, 2007) –...

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 2020

This article surveys the state of the field of the history of political thought. The premise of the discipline is that political arguments and ideas have developed historically and thus have theoretical histories that can be located and traced. But, as our survey of the field shows, what counts as ‘context’ is up for debate, and contextual methods have become more sensitive to present‐day concerns. The border between the history of political thought and political theory is increasingly porous. We begin with some of the main claims and criticisms of the ‘Cambridge’ method of political thought, chiefly associated with Quentin Skinner, John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock. We then consider newer developments, such as the ‘global turn’, which have steered the discipline beyond its traditionally European or male subject matter. While this shift in direction is welcome, we caution against a history that abstracts away from local sites of political contestation. Finally, we stress that (Western) historians moving beyond the West have even more reason to stay conscious of their own linguistic and cultural limitations.

Osmania journal of social sciences: bi-annual …, 2003