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Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog Jan 2003

Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

The explosion of primary texts from seven- teenth-century England continues to trigger an explosion of scholarly treatments today. For good reason, too: Lots of the primary texts are amazing, and not just those tired old warhors- es, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise. As fun and challenging as the primary texts are, you are forgiven a touch of skepticism if you wonder just what the latest author has to add to our understanding. You might redouble your skepticism if you just glance at Mark Stephen Jendrysik's table of contents, offering chapters on Winstanley, Milton, Cromwell, Filmer, and Hobbes, and zeroing …


Review Of The Dark Side Of The Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism In America, Donald J. Herzog Jan 2000

Review Of The Dark Side Of The Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism In America, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

In this elegantly written, provocative, and sometimes just plain provoking book, punctuated by bits of anguish and rather more pique, Richard Ellis worries that the American Left has been so passionate about equality that it has run roughshod over liberty. So put, the thesis is not exactly news. It has been the recurrent lament of conservative indictments- Tocqueville's is the canonical statement, but he has plenty of precursors and followers. And it has its scholarly variations, too, such as Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (1982). No profound surprises are on offer here.


Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1997

Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …


Review Of On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness And The Theory Of Ideology, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1997

Review Of On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness And The Theory Of Ideology, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Michael Rosen brings intoxicating erudition and an elegant if elusive prose style to crack—or pulverize—one of the most venerable chestnuts of social theory, the theory of ideology. For Rosen, the two central elements of that theory are (1) that societies are self-maintaining systems and (2) that they produce false consciousness in their members precisely because it helps to maintain society. And for Rosen, the theory is, well, a spectacular mess. Despite the efforts of such analytical Marxists as G. A. Cohen, he urges, no such view can be reconstructed in ways that begin to comport with our ordinary standards for …


Review Of The Idea Of A Liberal Theory: A Critique And Reconstruction, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1995

Review Of The Idea Of A Liberal Theory: A Critique And Reconstruction, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

The flood of literature sometimes derisively referred to as the Rawls/Nozick industry shows no signs of slowing. David Johnston enters the lists to champion an unabashedly cosmopolitan view-humanist liberalism-that focuses on promoting human agency for any and all people in any and all societies. He concedes that he has in place only a rudimentary sketch.


Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1994

Review Of Political Discourse In Early Modern Britain, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

This is a festschrift for the indefatigable J. G. A. Pocock (indefatigable indeed: the volume closes with a daunting nine-page bibliography of Pococks work to date, a veritable flood of erudition that shows no signs of ebbing). The essays are better than what usually end up stuck in such volumes: better as a simple matter of scholarly quality, but better too as exemplary models of what is distinctive in Pocock's approach. I suppose that at this price, no one will consider asking impoverished graduate students to purchase the volume. But there are always reserve desks, not to mention xerox machines …


Review Of Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism And Individuality In Political Theory And Practice, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1993

Review Of Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism And Individuality In Political Theory And Practice, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

This is an elegant and studied little volume, rather more difficult than it lets on. Flathman wants to argue that liberals are sorely in need of a more robust understanding of the will and individuality than they now possess, that they (or we) should be enthusiastically embracing what might seem to be some tendentious commitments about the partial but inescapable opacity of other selves. He does so by working through a large number of texts and authors-some only contentiously called liberal (Hobbes); others not conceivably liberal (William of Ockham, Augustine, Nietzsche); and still others not obviously interested in anything narrowly …


Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog Jan 1991

Review Of Transforming Political Discourse, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Political theorists are almost always fond of giving each other home- work assignments but not generally fond of completing them. The opening salvo in a promised three-volume campaign to redefine the tasks of political theory, Transforming Political Discourse might seem to invite more weary shrugs. Surely, we have too many manifestos already. Well, yes -but this one, happily, is modest, sensible, and mercifully brief. Better yet, its brevity is positively austere in sketching the metadescription of what the promised land looks like. The argument actually hangs on a series of show-and-tell exercises, which are supposed to be applications of the …