The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cambridge School

‘A History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction’ explores the core concerns and questions in the history of political thought, considering the field as a branch of political philosophy and political science. The approaches of core theorists, such as Reinhart Koselleck, Leo Strauss, Michel Foucault, and the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock are important to this topic. There is ongoing relevance for current politics which can be seen by assessing the current relationship between political history, theory, and action. There are some areas of political thinking that tend to draw on history because of the comparisons and contrasts that the past can offer to contemporary dilemmas.

“ ’What’s Gone and What’s Past Help...’: Oakeshott and Strauss on Historical Explanation”

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Contemporary Practice

AbstractBecause of the public identification of both Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss as conservative political philosophers, there have been numerous comparisons of their political thought. Whatever similarities or differences that do exist between them, it is certainly true that they shared a keen interest in the history of political thought. However, they understood the character of history in widely divergent ways. In the following paper, I examine the way in which each writer understood the logic of historical explanation, and there are two primary reasons for wanting to do so. First, there have been few examinations of either writer’s arguments concerning historical understanding, despite the stature of both as historians of political theory. Second, the differences between Oakeshott and Strauss on history are central to two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the past, each of which has manifested itself in the contemporary practice of the history of political thought. I will argue that Strauss’s approach to the past is primarily a practical one and yields a concern with a legendary or mythical past constructed primarily to address contemporary political problems, and that his specific methodological propositions are either irrelevant to a specifically historical understanding of the past or inadequately argued and unconvincing. Conversely, I will suggest that Oakeshott offers a coherent and compelling account of the logic of historical understanding, which involves both a defense of the autonomy of historical explanation and an elaboration of the character of historical contextualism.

scholarly journals In Defence of Political Parties: A Symposium on Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Bonotti ◽  
Jonathan White ◽  
Lea Leman Ypi ◽  
Gideon Calder ◽  
Mark Donovan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Single Text ◽  
History Of

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

8. Globality, morality, and the future

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Proletarian Revolution ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Actions ◽  
Cambridge School

‘Globality, morality, and the future’ recounts the 1960s research in the history of political thought, which was inspired by the writings of Leo Strauss, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck, and the Cambridge School authors. The reconstruction of the meaning of texts can be seen through the scholars’ ideological contexts and perspectives. Despite the rejection of Marxist categories for interrogating history and proletarian revolution, the world created by capitalism continues to be attacked for its endemic war and fanatical politics. Aspects of the history of political thought trained scholars to see the problems of contemporary society. The history of political thought allowed political actions to be charted and evaluated for success.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
James Schleifer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of

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.

scholarly journals Ein Modell Politischer Diskursanalyse

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Model ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Cambridge School

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

: Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought

2003 ◽  
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.

The History of Political Thought: A Short Introduction

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
Vincent C. Buscareno ◽  
R. N. Berki
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
History Of

Empty Esotericisms: Doctrines of Secret Writing and the Politics of a Platonic Code

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82
Author(s):  
Sean Noah Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Substantive Content ◽  
History Of

The aim of this article is to address the recently renewed debate pertaining to esotericism, secret messages encoded within writings from antiquity, especially in the writings of Plato. The question of esotericism has assumed a prominent role within debates concerning the history of political thought. Ever since Leo Strauss offered his suspicion that there were secrets ‘buried in the writings of the rhetoricians of antiquity’, the idea that philosophers deliberately concealed their true beliefs in a way that few could detect has been fiercely debated. More recently, the research of J.B. Kennedy has made international headlines for discovering a musical pattern embedded within Platonic writings, a pattern that Kennedy insists is evidence of Plato’s Pythagorean allegiance. The theses proffered by Strauss and Kennedy are empty doctrines of esotericism, or empty esotericisms. These doctrines insinuate the presence of secret or coded writing within Platonic dialogues but reveal no actual secret. These theses of esotericism falsely represent Plato as hyper-cryptic.Without actually providing substantive content, these notions of esotericism compel the reader to merely negate the exoteric writings of Plato, which actually render his already heterodox writings as commonplace and orthodox.

The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy: A Critique

1962 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Rothman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Study ◽  
The University ◽  
Moral Nihilism

Perhaps no single individual has had as much impact on the discipline of political science during the past several years as has Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago. Both he and his disciples (and they are disciples in the “classical” sense) have engaged in a full scale attack upon the premises underlying the contemporary study of politics.Strauss argues that these premises are illfounded and self-contradictory, and, if taken seriously, lead to moral nihilism. He contends, further, that another set of premises, those of “classical natural right,” which treat man in terms of his natural end and his relation to the “mysterious whole,” are capable of providing a more adequate foundation for the study of politics.

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