Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge school on the history of political thought
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Bibliographic Information
Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge school on the history of political thought
Routledge, 2019
- : hbk
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshott's analysis of the logic of historical enquiry.
While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of "pastness" necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents.
An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.
Table of Contents
- Part I: Two Historiographical Problems in Search of Solutions
- 1. Introduction: The Two Problems
- 2. Logic and Method in the History of Political Thought
- Part II: The Pastness of Past Political Thinking
- 3. The "Pastness" of the Historical Past
- 4. Oakeshott on the History of Political Thought
- 5. Pocock and Skinner on Oakeshott
- Part III: The Varieties of Past Political Thinking
- 6. Hobbes's Leviathan: Ideology and Philosophy
- 7. The Logic of the History of Political Philosophy
- 8. Conclusion: The Use and Abuse of History
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