<italic>History of Political Thought</italic>. By <sc>Raymond G. Gettell</sc>, Professor of Political Science in the University of California. (New York and London: Century Company. 1924. Pp. xi, 511. $3.75)

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

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Fear of Enemies and Collective Action. By Ioannis D. Evrigenis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 256p. $85.00.

Perspectives on Politics ◽

10.1017/s1537592709090276 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 165-167

Author(s):

Ivan Ermakoff

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Collective Action ◽

Political Thought ◽

Group Formation ◽

Negative Association ◽

History Of Political Thought ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Inflection Points ◽

History Of ◽

Positive Knowledge

This book may be read from two complementary and enlightening perspectives: as a history of political thought centered on the role played by fear in group formation, and as a theoretical treatise on “negative association,” that is, collective action based on a principle of identification in opposition to others. Both perspectives sustain each other. The first draws attention to a rich and insightful reinterpretation of classical and lesser-known texts. The peculiarity of this history of political thought is that it records not inflection points but continuity and resilience. The second perspective is intended to bring about positive knowledge. This conflation of genres is an appealing facet of the book. In tracing a continuity of thought, Ioannis Evrigenis purports to demonstrate the validity of a theoretical claim about the centrality of negative association. By the same token, the historical exposé lays bare the set of premises that sustains the claim.

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: Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought

The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197262948.003.0002 ◽

2003 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

P. J. Kelly

Keyword(s):

Political Science ◽

Political Thought ◽

Institutional History ◽

History Of Political Thought ◽

Political Ideas ◽

History Of ◽

American Intellectual ◽

Post War

This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.

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