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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
expositions and critical analyses too!, 2 Nov 2001
By A Customer
If you take into your hands a book bearing the title
Political Philosophy from Plato to Mao, you will most
probably expect it to contain expositions and critical
analyses of the main political doctrines and arguments
of Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke,
Rousseau, Hegel, Bentham and J.S. Mill, Marx and
Engels, and perhaps one or two of the 20th century
'theoreticians' of communism and fascism, ending with
Mao Tse-Tung. After all, these thinkers, with the
exception of the Great Helmsman, form the accepted
canon of political philosophy, established well before
the publication of George H. Sabine's magisterial
text-book A History of Political Theory which three
generations of philosophy and politics undergraduates
were made to work through. Martin Cohen's new book in some respects fulfils the
traditional or 'Sabine' image of what a book in the
history of political philosophy is like, in that it
devotes chapters or sections to several of the
canonical political thinkers. It also adds to the list
the 'Founding Fathers' of economic and social science,
like Adam Smith, Comte, Durkheim and Weber, as well as
controversial figures like Mao and Fukuyama who are not
regarded as philosophers. There is one more important
respect in which book is distinctly un-Sabine-like:
Cohen's choice and organisation of the material that
makes up the content of the book proceeds, so to speak,
from the idea of an unusual intellectual project. The nature of his project is summed out in the opening page
of the book as follows: "This is the story of political
society... It's the story of a few powerful ideas, which
have been around for millennia, but reappear in
different guises. It's a story told in the language of
political philosophy, in the words of just a handful of
writers." He goes on to say: "This branch of philosophy
is concerned with practical questions: about the
organisation of social life, about the make-up of the
government, the role and rights of the citizens, the
duties and limitations of the state." Cohen appears to believe that each society, from early
antiquity onwards, reflects in the manner of its
organisation and in the perennial concerns of its
members a set of ideas about what matters to them, what
they want, need, hope and value, and how these things
connect with the proper constitution, purposes, powers
and duties of the state and other political and legal
institutions. Philosophers and political thinkers
articulate and analyse these 'societal' ideas and they
proceed to develop sophisticated proposals as to how
the ideas can be realized under the prevailing
historical circumstances into concrete political
arrangements. Greeks in the 5th century BC, Englishmen
and women in the 17th century, workers in advanced
industrial countries in the 19th century, and Chinese
people in the 20th century all had more or less
definite ideas about what was good for them, what
constituted their well-being. Plato, Hobbes and Locke,
Marx and Engels, and Mao Tse-Tung formulated views as
to how their societies should be organized in order to
advance the physical and moral welfare of the people.
Thus the texts of a handful of remarkable political
writers can be read as analyses, commentaries and
proposals on issues of importance for their own
societies. This fact in turn gives importance to our
own efforts to understand and evaluate these texts. This, at least, is what I take to be Cohen's guiding
idea for the composition of his book.
How does Cohen try to carry his project through? Each
successive part of the book is centred around a
recognizably important political thinker and his
treatment of the issues that preoccupied him and his
contemporaries social order, justice, safety, liberty,
equality, the function of government or whatever. The
social conditions which the thinker lived, and the way
they impacted on his political sensibility and threw up
the issues which he grappled with are sketched by our
author with skill and concision. At the end of each
chapter various threads of doctrine and argument are
brought together and woven into a brief summary of his
'key ideas'. Cohen's summaries and interpretations of the doctrines of his political
philosophers seem to me to be generally reliable and fair - which I suppose
only means that his understanding of and responses to these doctrines happen
to be more or less similar to mine! No doubt other readers will form different
assessments. Something must be said about Cohen's style, which I think it is
something of a stylistic achievement: clear, relaxed, jargon-free and often
attractively witty. For example, after quoting a passage from Mao in which
the latter urged communists to subordinate their interests to those of the
nation and the masses and work with whole-hearted devotion to public duty,
Cohen adds caustically: "You can see why capitalism became more popular."
Unlike the 'Sabine' treatments of the great thinkers which may be found in
turgid academic text-books, Cohen does not hide his favour or even
admiration for some philosophers and dislike for others. In this regard his
book has similarities with the idiosyncratic judgments one finds in the elderly
Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, a book which as an
undergraduate I read with relish against the advice of my professors. I hope
that current undergraduates are offered a more varied and strongly-tasting
diet of commentaries, in which Cohen's book would be a valuable item. But
I suspect it will be some time before students are asked to deal with the
question: "Political power grows through the barrel of a gun. Discuss."
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