Thomas L. Pangle

Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal

The post-Cold War era has provoked a revival of various implicit as well as explicit returns to Stoic cosmopolitan theory as a possible source of a normative conceptual framework for international relations and global community. This article confronts this revival of interest in Stoicism with an analysis of Ciceros constructive critique of original Stoic conceptions of the world community. Particular attention is paid to the arguments by which Cicero identifies major flaws in the Stoic outlook and establishes the validity of his alternative notion of the “law of nations.” It is argued that Ciceros transformation of Stoicism issues in a more modest but more solid, as well as more civic-spirited, cosmopolitan theory. At the same time, the implications of Ciceros arguments for our understanding of justice altogether are clarified.

The Rhetorical Strategy Governing Aristotle’s Political Teaching

Recent scholars (e.g., Bodeus 1993; Mara 2000; Smith 2001; Tessitore 1996) have fruitfully proposed that we must strive to understand Aristotle’s distinctive didactic strategy as a writer. By attending more to the interrelationship between the Ethics and the Politics, and to the contrast with modern liberal theorizing on the issue of educative strategy, I show how Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy is at once a reaction to, and thereby a revelation of, his most profound reflections on the fraught relation between theorizing and its political context. The upshot is threefold: a new, more satisfactory comprehension of Aristotle’s manifold educational aims in writing for his diverse intended audience; a deeper insight into Aristotle’s conception of the relation between theory and practice (including publication)—in profound contrast to our Enlightenment liberal conception; and a new guide for how Aristotle’s political treatises ought to be studied and appreciated.

Entering the great debate

hY do we study and teach the Great Books? Why should we? The forms ese basic questions t ake -and the doubts or controversy implied in the questions-vary from one discipline to another. My discussion here of the reasons for, and the obstacles to, teaching the Great Books will be the product of my own, necessarily limited, experience of teaching those books within a political science department. Yet what I say will have substantial implications for the proper teaching of the Great Books in all deparunents. For one cannot, I believe, adequately defend the teaching of the Great Books without articulating a rather specific conception of liberal education in general. Moreover, I think that the perspective from which I will speak, while it is necessarily restricted, is for that very reason in some ways privileged. The teaching of the Great Books has a unique, uniquely paradoxical and therefore uniquely thoughtprovoking, status within the discipline of political science. Political science is by far the oldest of the social sciences. It can boast not merely a longstanding, but also a very distinguished, star-studded h i s to rybeginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and extending to such giants as Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx in the nineteenth century. As a result, it was taken for granted until several generations ago that the study of this illustrious history ought to be a central and required part of the political science discipline. But the very fact that the study of the Great Books was taken for granted meant that such study had gradually become more routine, antiquarian, and pedantic. Fewer and fewer political scientists--including, unfortunately, those who were scholars of the history of political thought--possessed or even thought much about a compelling justification for the required study of the history of political thought and its Great Books. Such justifications as were perfunctorily offered in the introductions to required courses and textbooks were either formulaic and platitudinous, or else raised more questions than they answered (see, for example, George Sabines preface to his well-known History of Political Theory of 1937). The study of the Great Books within political science depa~t~uents was ripe for devastating (and not altogether unjustified) criticism. The criticism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s under the twin banners of Science and Progress. The argument went as follows: political science ought, like the other social sciences (and maybe even the humanities, if they wish to be up-to-date and respectable), to strive to be a genuine sc ience-a science modeled (in a properly adapted form, to be sure) on the natural sciences. But the history of science is not a central or required part of genuine science, the natural sciences. The study of the history of science, mathematics, and medicine is at most a mere adornment for, or curious ancillary to, the education of

The Key Texts of Political Philosophy: Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his junior partner, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), laid the theoretical foundation of modern communism, which aims to bring about a new world order born out of the overthrow of “bourgeois capitalism.” The latter is the phrase Marx and Engels applied to the historically mature form of the system of competitive, acquisitive, commercial individualism that is articulated and defended in the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and their revisers – including Hume and Adam Smith. The term “bourgeois” derives from Rousseau, who was the first to create and to make stick that pejorative label for the society and way of life designed and successfully promoted by the Enlightenment. In the century and a half after Rousseau, European thought was dominated by attempts to find a solution to the problematic that Rousseau had laid out. History vs. Nature as Norm The most important turn taken in post-Rousseauean theorizing was to “the philosophy of history”: A new way of thinking, rooted in the contention that what Rousseau had discovered, without his fully realizing it, was that we must take our orientation in life, our positive normative standards, not from the idea of a permanent human nature but instead from a conception of humanity as coming into full maturation through history. If or since modern, civilized existence – and thus what we understand as human – is not a product of our original nature (which was that of a being close to an animal) but instead arises out of a historical development over a long time, then we should seek for standards for our human existence in that historical process and its outcome. Through history, humanity has gradually and painfully brought itself out of its original “natural” condition toward a fully completed “nature” or condition of being: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labor, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man.”

Introduction: The Philosophic Life in Question

The chapters of this book have a common theme: philosophy as a mode of existence put into question. Political societies frequently regard philosophers as potential threats to morality and religion, and those who speak for politics often demand a defense of philosophy. Beyond politics, theoretical people, too, advance a sophisticated panoply of charges against philosophic rationalism as a tenable or defensible basis for life. It is variously contended that everything is in flux and thus human reason is theoretically impotent, that divine will transcends and reveals the impotence of human reason, that philosophy self-destructs because it is based ultimately on faith rather than reason, that full philosophic independence and freedom are morally and psychologically unattainable will-o’-the-wisps, and that the profound disagreements among the greatest philosophers constitute undeniably decisive evidence of their failure to arrive at rationally demonstrable truths as regard the most important matters. The authors of the present volume—ranging widely over intellectual history from the Socratics to Maimonides and the Bible, from Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes through Rousseau to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and beyond, and then back again to Socrates—aspire to reopen the case for the philosophic life in the face of, and while doing justice to, its most severe challengers.

Book Review: From Enlightenment to RevolutionVoegelinEric (HallowellJohn H., ed.). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975. Pp. ix, 307.

crucial for the American Revolution and the founding of the new Atlantic republic. Pocock brings a wealth of ‘insight to his project and weaves his argument with remarkable skill and persuasion. Of considerable value are his careful analyses of the thought of a host of “minor” Italian and English writers who have been ignored by most generalists. His handling of the long neglected Augustan age is especially illuminating. There is little doubt that this book will become a focus of debate and controversy; it will be a valuable stimulus to further scholarship and methodological reflection. But while the genius of its architecture and the profundity of its execution will be widely recognized, some will not find it an altogether satisfying intellectual experience. It is a very difficult book to read and to comprehend, not solely because of the complexity of the subject matter, but also because of the often obscure, even baroque, style, which tends to detract from clarity and precision of expression. Specialists, undoubtedly, will fault aspects of the treatment of specific thinkers and periods. The analysis of Machiavelli’s conception of corruption, for example, is inadequate, containing little or no reference to his discussion of the problem in The History of Florence; moreover, the interpretation of his idea of equality is fairly superficial. However, the vital issue is the basic methodological assumption of the book. This is abstract, not concrete history. One has to remind oneself constantly that Pocock is dealing with flesh and blood people who face urgent problems in the world of action, people of deep commitment in the social conflict of their times. Past political theorizing has been more than a language game. The language of political theory is not merely language about language. A superstructural analysis is perhaps less than half the story. And so Pocock seems to admit, for in order to make his language history intelligible, he must pause now and again, if in a somewhat perfunctory manner, to establish its umbilical connection with the rest o f society. Insofar as he has succeeded in depoliticizing political theory, he has dehumanized history.