Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
Politics: Looking for Liberty
By Keith Thomas
Visions of Politics
by Quentin Skinner
Vol. 1: Regarding Method, 209 pp.
Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues, 461 pp.
Vol. 3: Hobbes and Civil Science, 386 pp.
Cambridge University Press,each volume $70.00; $24.99 (paper)
Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage
edited by Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner
Vol. 1: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, 420 pp.
Vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, 402 pp.
Cambridge University Press, each volume $65.00
Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric
by Kari Palonen
Polity, 207 pp., $64.95; $26.95 (paper)
In the mid-twentieth century most Anglo-American historians regarded the study of political thought as a peripheral subject. At one extreme, Marxists often dismissed ideas of any kind as mere epiphenomena of history, the mental reflections of deeper material forces. At the other, the followers of Sir Lewis Namier cynically wrote off the political philosophy of eighteenth-century politicians like Edmund Burke and Lord Bolingbroke as 'cant' and 'flapdoodle,' the specious rationalization for self-interested political maneuvers. In the US and Great Britain the historical study of political thinkers tended to be left to German refugees like Leo Strauss or Ernst Kantorowicz, who came from a different intellectual tradition, or to Australians and New Zealanders, whose distance from European archives gave them no option but to fall back on easily available printed texts for their research.
Review, 5533 words
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