The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (The Cambridge History of Political Thought)
Richard Bellamy
Language: English
Pages: 768
ISBN: 0521691621
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of political thought from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History covers the rise of the welfare state and subsequent reactions to it, the fascist and communist critiques of and attempted alternatives to liberal democracy, the novel forms of political organization occasioned by the rise of the mass electorate and new social movements, the various intellectual traditions from positivism to post-modernism that have shaped the study of politics, the interaction between western and non-western traditions of political thought, and the challenge possed to the state by globalization. Every major theme in twentieth-century political thought is covered in a series of chapters at once scholarly and accessible, of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards.
Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation
Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization
Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida
207–8; Croly 1915, pp. 148–9, 188–97; Rimlinger 1971, p. 64). Lippmann increasingly reflected the early twentiethcentury mixture of social (or in Britain, national) efficiency focused on a eugenic concern for the quality of human stock and interdependent human improvement. His was a liberalism that would ‘insure and indemnify against its own progressive development’. With unusual insight into the nature of welfare liberalism and unencumbered by the ideological constraints operating on British
Pareto condemned Marxism as utopian and unworkable, but was initially sympathetic to ‘popular socialism’ as an understandable reaction to government corruption and the failings of its economic policies (Pareto 1966 [1893], p. 70). However, the bourgeoisie had not returned to liberal ways to reconcile the workers to the advantages of the market. Instead, they had bought them off by resorting to state welfare. Since the free market remained the optimal system, the explanation for this strategy
rent-seeking kind, as when businesses justify incentive-giving tax cuts on the grounds that the economy as a whole will benefit. Because such groups frequently use intermediaries, their role in decision-making may not be immediately evident. Far from fostering democracy, however, their activities can profoundly distort the political agenda in ways that undermine it. By contrast, other kinds of minority interest may not be considered by competing leaders if political elites fear that courting them
changed many of its leaders and a number of its doctrines. Two months later, on 1 December, Mussolini declared in parliament that ‘the Fascist programme is not a theory of dogmas about which no discussion is tolerated’. The new party officially defined itself as ‘a revolutionary militia placed at the service of the nation. It follows a policy based on three principles: order, discipline, hierarchy’ (Gentile 1989, p. 102). Fascists defined themselves as a new elite called to lead Italy; in
social compensation – seen by some as the ‘logic of the welfare state’ (Luhmann 1990, p. 22) – for crucial and dehumanising lacunae in the human condition, whether through social inequity or personal handicap, which could deny individuals access to vital goods irrespective of their efforts or merit. In Titmuss’ stark phrasing, compensation was due to ‘the people who are compelled to pay – as diswelfares – part of the costs of other people’s progress in a dynamic and changing society’ (Titmuss