History of Political Philosophy

Citation

Strauss, L., & Cropsey, J. (Eds.). (1987). History of Political Philosophy (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Summary

This is a collection of essays, each written by a specialist on a single thinker or text, running to about 970 pages. The publisher presents it as an introduction to the chief contributors to the Western tradition of political philosophy from classical Greek antiquity to the twentieth century. The third edition was expanded significantly with both new and revised essays, and it keeps the prefaces to all three editions, an introduction, and an epilogue, "Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy" by Nathan Tarcov and Thomas L. Pangle. The essays follow a roughly chronological order and are listed here in groups, with the author of each in parentheses.

Introduction and Prefaces

The volume opens with the prefaces to the first, second and third editions and an introduction by the editors. The prefaces to each edition and the editors' introduction come before the first essay.

Antiquity: Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero

The first essays cover Thucydides (David Bolotin), Plato (Leo Strauss), Xenophon (Christopher Bruell), Aristotle (Carnes Lord) and Marcus Tullius Cicero (James E. Holton). Strauss himself writes the Plato essay.

Medieval and Christian, Islamic and Jewish Thought

The next essays treat St. Augustine (Ernest L. Fortin), Alfarabi (Muhsin Mahdi), Moses Maimonides (Ralph Lerner), St. Thomas Aquinas (Ernest L. Fortin) and Marsilius of Padua (Leo Strauss). Including Alfarabi and Maimonides alongside the Christian authors gives the medieval section a range wider than the Latin West.

Renaissance, Reformation and Early Modern Thought

Niccolo Machiavelli (Leo Strauss), Martin Luther and John Calvin and Richard Hooker (both Duncan B. Forrester), Francis Bacon (Howard B. White), Hugo Grotius (Richard H. Cox), Thomas Hobbes (Laurence Berns), Rene Descartes (Richard Kennington), John Milton (Walter Berns), Benedict Spinoza (Stanley Rosen) and John Locke (Robert A. Goldwin) form the early modern sequence.

Enlightenment and Revolutionary Era

The next group covers Montesquieu (David Lowenthal), David Hume (Robert S. Hall), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Allan Bloom), Immanuel Kant (Pierre Hassner), William Blackstone (Herbert J. Storing), Adam Smith (Joseph Cropsey), The Federalist (Martin Diamond), Thomas Paine (Francis Canavan) and Edmund Burke (Harvey Mansfield, Jr.). The inclusion of Blackstone, Smith, the Federalist and Paine extends the history to legal, economic and constitutional writers.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (Timothy Fuller), G. W. F. Hegel (Pierre Hassner, translated by Allan Bloom), Alexis de Tocqueville (Marvin Zetterbaum), John Stuart Mill (Henry M. Magid), Karl Marx (Joseph Cropsey) and Friedrich Nietzsche (Werner J. Dannhauser) lead to the final essays on John Dewey (Robert Horwitz), Edmund Husserl (Richard Velkley) and Martin Heidegger (Michael Gillespie).

Epilogue: Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy

The closing essay by Tarcov and Pangle takes Leo Strauss and the history of political philosophy as its subject.

Key Concepts

Antiquity and the Medieval Period

• One thinker per essay: each essay presents the political teaching of a single thinker or text, which is the organizing principle of the collection.
• Classical political thought: the starting point of the tradition, represented by Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and Cicero.
• Medieval political thought: the essays on Augustine, Alfarabi, Maimonides, Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua, spanning Christian, Islamic and Jewish authors.

Modernity

• Early modern political thought: the sequence from Machiavelli and Bacon through Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke.
• Enlightenment and constitutional writing: Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Blackstone, Smith, the Federalist, Paine and Burke.
• Nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought: Bentham and James Mill, Hegel, Tocqueville, J. S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Husserl and Heidegger.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Specialist authors. Each essay is written by a scholar who knows the thinker, and some are by the editors themselves: Strauss writes on Plato, Marsilius and Machiavelli, and Cropsey on Adam Smith and Marx.
• Coverage. The collection treats 38 thinkers or texts across more than two millennia and is a convenient reference for the standard sequence of the history of the subject.
• An editorial frame. The editors' introduction, the prefaces to three editions and the closing epilogue give the volume a consistent character, which makes it easy to read several essays as a series.
• Wide span within the Western tradition. The Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophers, the Federalist and Blackstone appear alongside the better-known canonical figures.

Limitations

• A particular scholarly orientation. The volume is edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, includes three of Strauss's own essays and ends with an epilogue on Strauss himself, so it reflects one approach to reading the tradition. Readers should compare it with other accounts, such as single-author interpretive histories.
• Western focus. The scope is the Western tradition only, as the publisher says.
• Twentieth-century coverage is brief. The final essays treat Dewey, Husserl and Heidegger. The volume does not include essays on later twentieth-century theorists.
• Length and prerequisites. At about 970 pages, it is a reference to dip into. The essays are most useful to readers who have read the primary text under discussion.

Where It Fits in the Course

This course group is mostly primary texts: Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli's The Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, Rousseau's The Social Contract, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mill's On Liberty and Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto. The essays in Strauss and Cropsey correspond to most of these, so the volume works as a set of companion essays: read the primary text, then the matching essay.

Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision is the other secondary work in the group. It is a single-author interpretive history that reads the canonical thinkers as responses to the problem of what the political is. Reading Wolin for the overall story and Strauss and Cropsey for individual essays offers two contrasting views.

How to Use This Book

The book is for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who have read several of the classic texts, ideally in full. It is meant to be consulted, not read straight through.

A practical plan:

• Start with the editors' material: Read the introduction and the prefaces to learn what the editors set out to do.
• Pair essays with texts: After reading a primary work, read the essay on its author. For this course, the most relevant are Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Mill and Marx.
• Compare readings: Read an essay beside another account of the same thinker and note where the interpretations differ.
• Finish with the epilogue: The Tarcov and Pangle essay explains the editor's approach and helps in judging the collection as a whole.