Book Reviews : Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism, Routledge Curzon, London/New York, 2002, 366 pp. �65.00 / $114.95.

2005 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-216
Author(s):  
Evert Van Der Zweerde
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Joseph Stalin

Book Reviews

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-92
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Machu Picchu ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The University ◽  
Literary Encounters ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

Randy Malamud, The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist. Chicago/Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2018, vii + 236 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1783208746, $29.50 (paperback).Mark Rice, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth Century Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), xvi + 253 pp., ISBN 978-1-4696-4353-3, $28.75 (paperback).Jeffrey Mather, Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China: Modernism, Travel, and Form (New York: Routledge, 2020), ix + 182 pp., ISBN 978-1-03-208815-0, US $48.95 (paperback).

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Balot
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
Rational Order ◽  
Stated Purpose

This chapter evaluates the arguments and intentions of Leo Strauss’s most ambitious political text, Natural Right and History. Strauss’s stated purpose is to rehabilitate the ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of “natural right”—a term of art by which he referred to the justice inherent in the rational order of nature. His express motivation was to rebut the relativism and historicism that, in his view, characterized twentieth-century political thought. This chapter contends that the book’s core lies in its implicit presentation of philosophical inquiry as the highest human vocation. This idea is presented less through systematic argument than through Strauss’s own engagement with canonical political texts—an engagement designed to illustrate both the excitement and the fulfillment of philosophical dialogue. The political virtues, while defended on the surface of the text, remain as unsettled by the end as they were in the introduction.

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