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
Preface
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
These essays, written over the last five years, reflect the pleasures (and I hope also in some measure the benefits) of thinking about the history of political theory in Cambridge in the intellectual atmosphere established over the last three decades, especially by Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck and Istvan Hont, and steadily enhanced more recently by very many others. They also reflect the continuing stimulus of a remarkable range of colleagues and students who come to, or pass through, Cambridge from all over the world. It is a privilege to work in a setting of such beauty as that of King's College, and to work amongst such a rich and constantly changing array of friends and intellectual companions: a privilege which entails too many intellectual and personal debts for me even to begin to try to register them here. I should, however, like especially on this occasion to acknowledge what I continue to owe to my friends in Japan (above all to Professor Takamaro Hanzawa and Professor Takashi Kato and to their remarkable teacher Professor Kan'ichi Fukuda), to my King's colleague Istvan Hont, to my students over the last decade (NickTaylor most of all), and to Silvana Dean and Helen Gibson who do so much to make the Department of Social and Political Sciences an endurable framework in which to work as a university teacher, even a decade and a half after the coming of Margaret Thatcher.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995