Pub Date : 2022-09-19DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522000845
Rachel Bayefsky
{"title":"Colin Bird: Human Dignity and Political Criticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii, 266.)","authors":"Rachel Bayefsky","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522000845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522000845","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"85 1","pages":"128 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44496311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-14DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522000596
Daniel E. Cullen
{"title":"Jonathan Marks: Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 221.)","authors":"Daniel E. Cullen","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522000596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522000596","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"656 - 658"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41319420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-14DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522000833
Christopher Peys
{"title":"Caroline Ashcroft: Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 278.)","authors":"Christopher Peys","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522000833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522000833","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"85 1","pages":"136 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45963935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-13DOI: 10.1017/S003467052200078X
G. Conti
In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.
{"title":"The English Utilitarians, Some Recent Reconsiderations","authors":"G. Conti","doi":"10.1017/S003467052200078X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467052200078X","url":null,"abstract":"In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"613 - 629"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48744978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-13DOI: 10.1017/S0034670522000869
Mathias Thaler
liberal value. By the book’s end, tempered liberalism is revealed to be a species of perfectionist liberalism, complete with prescriptions for how society could educate citizens so that they internalize pluralism (201). Sensing trouble, Cherniss denies that his view is perfectionist, claiming that it is “not a comprehensive ideal, but a specifically political ethos” (208). Yet this is belied by his earlier depiction of pluralism. There, pluralism is “a certain relationship to the moral life” (190) and is “connected to existential and epistemological/methodological pluralism,” which denies that there could be “one infallible method of intellectual framework” to make sense of human experience; Cherniss also claims that pluralism rejects the idea that “life can be rendered meaningful by reference to some single ultimate good” (201). Oddly, Liberalism in Dark Times ends where the later Rawls begins. The lingering question is whether there is a viable conception of liberalism that can accommodate the fact that liberal citizens will disagree persistently over fundamentals concerning the structure and content of liberal values. Ultimately, tempered liberalism stands as nothing more than another liberal doctrine that one hopes can join an overlapping consensus on specific institutional arrangements. That said, Cherniss is correct to think that the political project of liberalism would be on firmer ground amid the social turmoil we are currently experiencing if all liberals were committed to the same way of understanding how core liberal values fit together. But that is no response to the liberal predicament. Rather, it is simply another formulation of it.
{"title":"S. D. Chrostowska: Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. 215.)","authors":"Mathias Thaler","doi":"10.1017/S0034670522000869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670522000869","url":null,"abstract":"liberal value. By the book’s end, tempered liberalism is revealed to be a species of perfectionist liberalism, complete with prescriptions for how society could educate citizens so that they internalize pluralism (201). Sensing trouble, Cherniss denies that his view is perfectionist, claiming that it is “not a comprehensive ideal, but a specifically political ethos” (208). Yet this is belied by his earlier depiction of pluralism. There, pluralism is “a certain relationship to the moral life” (190) and is “connected to existential and epistemological/methodological pluralism,” which denies that there could be “one infallible method of intellectual framework” to make sense of human experience; Cherniss also claims that pluralism rejects the idea that “life can be rendered meaningful by reference to some single ultimate good” (201). Oddly, Liberalism in Dark Times ends where the later Rawls begins. The lingering question is whether there is a viable conception of liberalism that can accommodate the fact that liberal citizens will disagree persistently over fundamentals concerning the structure and content of liberal values. Ultimately, tempered liberalism stands as nothing more than another liberal doctrine that one hopes can join an overlapping consensus on specific institutional arrangements. That said, Cherniss is correct to think that the political project of liberalism would be on firmer ground amid the social turmoil we are currently experiencing if all liberals were committed to the same way of understanding how core liberal values fit together. But that is no response to the liberal predicament. Rather, it is simply another formulation of it.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"85 1","pages":"141 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45700714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-06DOI: 10.1017/S0034670522000663
E. Street
Abstract In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech “tragic” owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact “anti-tragic” and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.
{"title":"Judgment in the Fourth-Century BCE Athenian Courts as Anti-Tragedy: Demosthenes's On the Crown","authors":"E. Street","doi":"10.1017/S0034670522000663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670522000663","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech “tragic” owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact “anti-tragic” and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"497 - 519"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47302633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-06DOI: 10.1017/s003467052200064x
Fred L. Rush
{"title":"David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021. Pp. xii, 692.)","authors":"Fred L. Rush","doi":"10.1017/s003467052200064x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s003467052200064x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"630 - 634"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44655499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-06DOI: 10.1017/S0034670522000730
Nasser Behnegar, D. Stauffer, Rafael Major, C. Nadon
Abstract The denial of Locke's debt to Hobbes has long been characteristic of many scholars of Locke influenced by the Cambridge School. Peter Laslett was the first to argue for this view, and he did so in conscious opposition to Leo Strauss and his interpretation of Locke. The recent discovery by Felix Waldmann of a memoir that confirms Locke's deep interest in Hobbes as well as his prudent concealment of that interest has undermined Laslett's case against Strauss. Waldmann's discovery, moreover, comes in the wake of other historical work, by Jeffrey Collins and others, that has provided further grounds for abandoning the Cambridge view of Locke. These developments have yet to lead to a serious reengagement with Strauss's interpretation of Locke, but they should, because his controversial claim about Locke's debt to Hobbes has been vindicated.
{"title":"From Laslett to Waldmann: The Case for Reconsidering Strauss on Locke","authors":"Nasser Behnegar, D. Stauffer, Rafael Major, C. Nadon","doi":"10.1017/S0034670522000730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670522000730","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The denial of Locke's debt to Hobbes has long been characteristic of many scholars of Locke influenced by the Cambridge School. Peter Laslett was the first to argue for this view, and he did so in conscious opposition to Leo Strauss and his interpretation of Locke. The recent discovery by Felix Waldmann of a memoir that confirms Locke's deep interest in Hobbes as well as his prudent concealment of that interest has undermined Laslett's case against Strauss. Waldmann's discovery, moreover, comes in the wake of other historical work, by Jeffrey Collins and others, that has provided further grounds for abandoning the Cambridge view of Locke. These developments have yet to lead to a serious reengagement with Strauss's interpretation of Locke, but they should, because his controversial claim about Locke's debt to Hobbes has been vindicated.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"570 - 591"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42949562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522000626
Samuel Weber
{"title":"Caleb J. Basnett: Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp. x, 205.)","authors":"Samuel Weber","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522000626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522000626","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"650 - 653"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42753231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522000778
J. Warner
{"title":"Ioanna Tourkochoriti: Freedom of Expression: The Revolutionary Roots of American and French Legal Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 296.)","authors":"J. Warner","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522000778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522000778","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"84 1","pages":"645 - 647"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41781829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}