"In the room the graduate students come and go, talking of Michel Foucault". Michael Shapiro presents an instructive critique of positivism in contemporary political science from the perspective of contemporary philosophy--including Husserl, Heidegger, several linguistic analysts, Habermas, and, principally, Michel Foucault, who in fact reviewed the manuscript. Shapiro describes his work as a "meta-politics," an inquiry into what makes phenomena political. He criticizes the social sciences for neglecting the extent to which language shapes thought. The regnant positivism "restricts the meaning (...) of statements to the relationship between the utterance and that which the utterance is about, thereby ignoring the context that is involved in constituting what an utterance is about and the relationship between the speaker and the utterance". On the contrary, "to speak is... to be caught in the flow of that activity rather than to create or initiate a wholly new activity". Language makes men. Shapiro reiterates this contention in critiques of the positivist understanding of various issues in social science, such as the fact-value distinction, motive and intention in human action, political science models, and the relationship between theory or knowledge and ideology. (shrink)

No one can fail to be impressed by Paul Rahe's magnificent contribution to the history of political theory. With almost eight hundred pages of text and over four hundred pages of notes and elaborate index, it is an indispensable reference for scholars concerned with classical political philosophy and its ramifications for the West, particularly in America. The volume's three books--"The Ancien Regime," "New Modes and Orders", and "Inventions of Prudence"--present reflective accounts of ancient republicanism, early modern political philosophers, and the (...) American novus ordo seclorum, respectively. A historian by training, Rahe displays an impressive command of the scholarship in both political philosophy and political history. It is a rare scholar who would not profit from this book. (shrink)

William M. Sullivan wishes to restore the themes of civic republicanism, responsibility, and human dignity to their high place in public life. The first two-thirds of the book makes familiar criticisms of selfish, individualistic liberalism in its political, philosophic, and psychological dimensions. The remainder presents the author's own alternatives. Surveying contemporary economic and social analysis, Sullivan maintains that "the present crisis of government is a general crisis of the liberal capitalist form of society". Due to its "contradictions" liberal capitalism can (...) no longer distribute goods as it has, and in any event it cannot foster human dignity. But the real problem is that liberalism, with its roots in Hobbes and Locke, emphasizes individual freedom while having merely instrumental notions of social relationships, value, and reason. The modern philosophic tradition, including such critics of the earlier moderns as Rousseau and Kant, by and large failed to provide the proper "moral ecology" which connects individual motivation with communal "social interactions." Now, John Rawls at least possesses a more appropriate moral ecology, as evidenced by his difference principle. But in the end even Rawls's admirable effort repeats liberalism's failing. Morality remains disjointed in Lawrence Kohlberg's structuralist psychology of moral reasoning. For him "Moral judgment is... a practical application of a decision procedure which can be stated in a formal principle". Kohlberg's levels and stages exhibit a nihilistic "failure of moral imagination" which invalidates his claim to have established true formal principles; for instance, his moral reasoning scale slights women. Contrary to all these variants of liberalism, Sullivan seeks a politics and morality based on a social human nature; hence he makes Dewey an honorable exception to his critique of liberalism, as the book's title indicates. (shrink)

This book's principal virtue is its attempt, in the first two-thirds of the text, to take seriously the speech of the Laws in the Crito, while disputing the "authoritarian" interpretation of it. In the remainder Kraut seeks to make the Crito consistent with the "early dialogues," concluding that Socrates is less hostile to democracy than much conventional scholarship makes him out to be.