Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments
Language: English
Pages: 292
ISBN: 0521185068
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book demonstrates the rich diversity and depth of political philosophy in the twentieth century. Catherine H. Zuckert has compiled a collection of essays recounting the lives of political theorists, connecting each biography with the theorist's life work and explaining the significance of the contribution to modern political thought. The essays are organized to highlight the major political alternatives and approaches. Beginning with essays on John Dewey, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci, representing the three main political alternatives - liberal, fascist, and communist - at mid-century, the book proceeds to consider the lives and works of émigrés such as Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss, who brought a continental perspective to the United States after World War II. The second half of the collection contains essays on recent defenders of liberalism, such as Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, and John Rawls, and liberalism's many critics, including Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
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interpreted too narrowly. True social efficiency, he says, requires the possession and use of leisure, art, and recreation (127). The second part of the book also stresses the commonality that Dewey sees between a model democratic society and an ideal community of scientific inquirers – a point worth examining in some detail. First, he attempts to show the inadequacy of epistemological rationalism (the view that knowledge begins with an act of pure mind or reason) as opposed to pragmatic
philosophical studies in his French schooling. As he entered higher studies and throughout his years before his 1938 departure to the United States, he wrote almost constantly for journals, magazines, and newspapers, and although political themes and issues were 91 ´ Emigr´ e responses to World War II by no means his exclusive concern, they were regularly in evidence. On his arrival at the University of Notre Dame in 1938, it was not surprising that he got involved in a small circle of faculty
work of, or could take the place of, A Theory of Justice. When it comes to the question of social justice in liberal democracies, no serious discussion can occur without reference to Rawls. Nevertheless, it is useful to be reminded that the question of social justice is only one of many 1 See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 109 ´ Emigr´ e responses to World War II confronting liberal democracies at the present time, even if one thinks – as I do –
Princeton University Press, 2001), 1–32. 117 ´ Emigr´ e responses to World War II Foremost among these prejudices was the oblivion or effacement of the basic political phenomenon of human plurality. For Arendt, human plurality – the “fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” – was the fundamental constitutive condition of politics and political relations. And politics, for Arendt, was not a relation of rule or domination, the activity of administration, or the state’s
H. L. A. Hart: a twentieth-century Oxford political philosopher “is a step forward as important to society as the invention of the wheel.”12 The difference in normative types (ways of functioning) is grounded on the differences in social function – that is, on the different reasons for valuing them – which make exercise of powers “a form of purposive activity utterly different from performance of duty or submission to coercive control.”13 Although Hart loyally continues to speak of this