ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1966
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hutchinson
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 Jan. 1966
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Length: 216 Pages

Discusses concepts of social and moral equality in postwar British philosophical context


“Is there still such a subject,” Isaiah Berlin has asked, “as Political Theory?” John Wilson’s newest book, the sixth to come from this relatively young (thirty-eight) English moral philosopher, will not settle the issue. If anything, it is evidence on both sides of the question.

If we think of political theory as any attempt to examine the great public issues of the day in the light of universal ethical principles, Mr. Wilson’s book certainly qualifies for library classification on the same shelves as all the major and minor works of political thought referred to in college courses “from Plato to the present.” But if we think of it as an effort to champion a great public cause by marshalling all the arguments in favor and refuting the arguments against—in the sense that Plato and Aristotle championed the cause of the just polis, or Hobbes of absolutism and Locke of Whiggery, or even as Sartre and Camus have spoken for the idealistic but alienated man of our time—then Wilson’s book is not political theory but something else and something less.

Style is one index to the difference. Wilson’s treatise will surely not be read with pleasure or enthusiasm or even great benefit by those who do not share the intellectual outlook and interests of the school of philosophy in which he has chosen to swim. For Wilson is one of the new breed of “analytic philosophers” or, as they are also known, “linguistic philosophers.” And that is a rather different kettle of fish from what most of us are accustomed to in political theory. Isaiah Berlin, by contrast, while he is sympathetic toward the newer mode, is himself a representative of an older tradition that may be said to have been begun by Hegel early in the nineteenth century. In this tradition the philosopher works as an historian of ideas, taking his bearings from what has been thought before and offering his own reflections in an effort to extend the dialogue into the present.

Keywords: philosophy, political theory, ethics, midcentury, Oxford scholar