Comparing political thinkers / edited by Ross Fitzgerald
- Sydney Pergamon Press 1980
- 302p.
Comparing Political Thinkers is a collection of fifteen original essays, written independently of each other, by political theorists from the English-speaking world. A primary aim of the book is to compare arguments advanced by different political thinkers - some ancient, some modern, some Eastern, some from the West. The list of thinkers dealt with is as follows: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Augustine, Hobbes, More, Marsilius, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Calvin, Kropotkin, Mill, Herbert Marcuse, Christian Bay, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Thus this collection contrasts thinkers not only often across time, but also between very different social and cultural contexts. Some pairs of thinkers (such as Socrates and Plato) come from the same place and from very similar times; others (such as Plato and Confucius, Aristotle and Mencius) from roughly the same times, but from very different places and social environments. Others yet again (for example, Hobbes and St Augustine) come from very different times, places and environments. Despite the inevitable omission of key thinkers (names like Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung readily come to mind) and despite the fact that essays of this length must, of necessity, simplify and compress often very subtle arguments, the student embarking on the study of political thought will be given a taste of seminal political ideas and also of the intriguing activity of comparing political arguments advanced by different thinkers. Such an activity raises very interesting and complex methodological problems, about comparison, which are dealt with by some of the contributors, especially focusing on the problem of thinkers employing a very different political vocabulary and language.