Volume 11, Number 10 · December 5, 1968
A Lost Politics
By Leonard Schapiro
The Russian Empire 1801-1917
by Hugh Seton-Watson
Oxford, 813 pp., $10.00
Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology
edited by Marc Raeff, with an Introduction by Isaiah Berlin
Harcourt, Brace & World, 404 pp., $5.25 (paper)
Russian Philosophy
edited by James M. Edie, edited by James P. Scanlan, edited by Mary Barbara Zeldin, with the collaboration of George L. Kline
Quadrangle Books, Vol. III, 521 pp., $8.50
Historical Letters
by Peter Lavrov, translated with an Introduction and Notes by James P. Scanlan
California, 371 pp., $9.50
The Russian Anarchists
by Paul Avrich
Princeton, 303 pp., $7.50
Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian
by Robert E. MacMaster
Harvard, 368 pp., $7.95
Russian Political Thought: An Introduction
by Thornton Anderson
Cornell, 444 pp., $9.75
The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
by James H. Billington
Knopf, 786 pp., $15.00
There is a continuing interest in the history of political thought, an enduring curiosity to learn how men in the past have reflected on the state, on the process of living together in society, and on the conditions of the just and good life. Even the current fashion for concrete sociological enquiries has not wholly displaced our interest in the forms of speculation to which we give the name 'political thought,' This interest is no mere idle intellectual curiosity. Political thought is an integral part of the history of mankind. Take away the few writers on politics on the European scene in the last few centuries whose names first spring to mind—Machiavelli, Calvin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx—and history becomes meaningless. Can the history of Europe and America be understood without these names? All the more strange does it seem, therefore, that we have for generations been writing and talking about the history of Russia with only the most shadowy equipment, in the English language, for studying Russian political thought—beyond, perhaps, Herzen or Lenin.
Review, 3193 words
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