Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The History of Political Theory
- 3 Contractualism
- 4 Political obligation
- 5 Trust
- 6 The claim to freedom of conscience: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of worship?
- 7 Property justice and common good after socialism
- 8 The dilemma of humanitarian intervention: the executive power of the Law of Nature, after God
- 9 Specifying and understanding racism
- 10 Political science, political theory and policy making in an interdependent world
- 11 Democracy: the politics of making, defending and exemplifying community: Europe 1992
- 12 Is there a contemporary crisis of the nation state?
- 13 Political and economic obstacles to rapid collective learning
- 14 The heritage and future of the European left
- Index
2 - The History of Political Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The History of Political Theory
- 3 Contractualism
- 4 Political obligation
- 5 Trust
- 6 The claim to freedom of conscience: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of worship?
- 7 Property justice and common good after socialism
- 8 The dilemma of humanitarian intervention: the executive power of the Law of Nature, after God
- 9 Specifying and understanding racism
- 10 Political science, political theory and policy making in an interdependent world
- 11 Democracy: the politics of making, defending and exemplifying community: Europe 1992
- 12 Is there a contemporary crisis of the nation state?
- 13 Political and economic obstacles to rapid collective learning
- 14 The heritage and future of the European left
- Index
Summary
All human efforts to understand rest in the end on some conception of what it is to understand something - of what understanding consists of. In the modern world the most powerful conception of what it is to understand something has long been drawn from the astonishingly successful historical career of the sciences of nature. It may not be easy (or, in the end, even possible) to specify clearly the sense in which these dynamic bodies of highly disciplined belief are in fact either genuinely cumulative or cognitively reliable. But it is certainly part of the thoroughly demotic consciousness of most inhabitants of industrial countries today to assume that the sciences of nature do offer genuine knowledge, and that they do so about a subject matter which can only be sanely understood as, in the last instance, independent of human preferences and preoccupations. For the sciences of nature, the universe, in a tradition which reaches back to Aristotle and beyond (Lear 1988), can only be accurately understood as consisting in the last instance of a vast assemblage of natural kinds:types of entity which exist apart from, and prior to, the vagaries of human interest - physical particles, chemical elements, biological species, stars and so on.
But the history of political thinking, like the history of other aspects of human thinking, while it is obviously located within the history of the natural universe, has a very different focus.
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- The History of Political Theory and Other Essays , pp. 11 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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