Recovering Political Philosophy

This book analyzes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from a political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on politics in Swift’s writings, this has usually meant a study of how Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver’s Travels is fundamentally a book about the “ancients” (e.g. Plato, Aristotle), and the “moderns” (science and technology), and their contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the Travels is “a kind of prolegomena” to political philosophy leaves open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve, a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political philosophy’s “larger questions” we are prone to ignore.  Swift, Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle’s political writings and in Plato’s Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.

Relativism, or the claim that it is possible that the appearances and opinions of each of us are correct for each of us, and hence that any view is as true as any other, has remained a continuing problem for philosophy and science for 2,500 years. Today, because of the widespread acceptance of relativism, the problem is greater than ever before. This book argues that Plato in fact solved this problem. In the first two chapters, by means of a study of Husserl and Locke, Davis shows that it is possible to return to and take seriously Plato’s treatment of this problem. The third chapter presents Plato’s solution to it. This book is distinctive in that it shows that a problem that has been thought to be present throughout the history of Western thought was in fact solved by Plato, and in that it shows that we can, beginning from our contemporary situation, return to Plato’s solution.

This volume is an inquiry into the history of political philosophy by way of the general theme of education. Each contributor addresses the relationship between a particular political philosopher’s broad teaching on the best political order and that political philosopher’s teaching about education. The unifying contention of the work is that each political philosopher considered in the volume promotes a certain kind of political regime and therefore a particular mode of education essential to that regime. Each chapter, written by a separate contributor, is distinguished from the others primarily by the political philosopher being considered. The book has a chapter dedicated to each of the following political philosophers: Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. The volume provides a survey of educational models by some of the greatest thinkers of the West, while continually demonstrating that the two themes of politics and education are inseparable.

This book offers an original interpretation of Plato’s Laws and a new account of its enduring importance. Ballingall argues that the republican regime conceived in the Laws is built on „reverence,“ an archaic virtue governing emotions of self-assessment—particularly awe and shame. Ballingall demonstrates how learning to feel these emotions in the right way, at the right time, and for the right things is the necessary basis for the rule of law conceived in the dialogue. The Laws remains surprisingly neglected in the scholarly literature, although this is changing. The cynical populisms haunting liberal democracies are focusing new attention on the “characterological” basis of constitutional government and Plato’s Laws remains an indispensable resource on this question, especially when we attend to the theme of reverence at its core.