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The Strangeness of Socrates

T.H. Irwin, 21 November 1991

Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher 
by Gregory Vlastos.
Cambridge, 334 pp., £35, April 1991, 0 521 30733 3
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... of scepticism about constructive moral argument) enjoys renewed favour among moral philosophers. John Rawls has remarked that the ideal method of moral philosophy is Socratic; and Vlastos’s account shows why a Socratic method deserves to be taken seriously and examined critically. Much of the best work on Socratic and Platonic ethics that has been ...

The Estate Agent

Terry Eagleton: Stanley Fish, 2 March 2000

The Trouble with Principle 
by Stanley Fish.
Harvard, 328 pp., £15.50, December 1999, 0 674 91012 5
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... universalism it deplores, rather than a genuine alternative to it. Stanley Fish is the flipside of John Rawls rather as tribalism is the terrible twin of globalism, or the view from nowhere is inevitably countered by the view from us alone. In this respect, Fish is a fully paid-up tribalist who, like Slobodan Milosevic, champions a unique people moulded ...

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester: Karl Popper, 26 April 2012

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 
by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.
Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 0
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... a little different if they had. In a number of the essays collected here Popper sounds a lot like John Rawls, who emphasised the importance of distributive justice and the need for social policies that improve the lot of the least well-off: a far cry from Friedman’s market liberalism, and from the neoliberalism of today. This was a road not ...

How do they see you?

Elizabeth Spelman: Martha Nussbaum, 16 November 2000

Sex and Social Justice 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Oxford, 476 pp., £25, July 1999, 0 19 511032 3
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Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £17.95, May 2000, 0 521 66086 6
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... of her blows is shaped in large part by her chosen sparring partners: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Moller Okin. Though some of the nudging she gives feminists – typically referred to in Sex and Social Justice as ‘them’ but in the more recent Women and Human Development as ‘my ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... equilibrium’ – an aesthetically interested revision of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ of John Rawls, which puts to work the pleasures and pains that come from imaginative sympathy and not just those that come from social information. The equilibrium is finally achieved when, the sympathetic reading finished, the spectator can assess ‘from her ...

Casuistries of Peace and War

Perry Anderson: The assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics share, 6 March 2003

... Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains about that? 4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed ...

Ideologues

Peter Pulzer, 20 February 1986

The Redefinition of Conservatism: Politics and Doctrine 
by Charles Covell.
Macmillan, 267 pp., £27.50, January 1986, 0 333 38463 6
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Thinkers of the New Left 
by Roger Scruton.
Longman, 227 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 582 90273 8
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The Idea of Liberalism: Studies for a New Map of Politics 
by George Watson.
Macmillan, 172 pp., £22.50, November 1985, 0 333 38754 6
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Socialism and Freedom 
by Bryan Gould.
Macmillan, 109 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 333 40580 3
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... discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some ...

A Dog in the Fight

William Davies: Am I a fan?, 18 May 2023

A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat 
by Paul Campos.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15, September 2022, 978 0 226 82348 5
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... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...

The Mask It Wears

Pankaj Mishra: The Wrong Human Rights, 21 June 2018

The People v. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It 
by Yascha Mounk.
Harvard, 400 pp., £21.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97682 5
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Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World 
by Samuel Moyn.
Harvard, 277 pp., £21.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 73756 3
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... persuaded himself, briefly, that the US could create a global cosmopolis in the spirit of Kant. John Rawls, transplanting his theory of justice into the realm of international relations, declared in 1999 that societies that violate human rights rightly provoke economic sanctions and military intervention. Liberal peoples, who are naturally indifferent ...

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics 
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4
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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4
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... Oxford meeting, she writes, ‘a fine House was whipped up to vote for the honour. The dons at St John’s were simply told “the women are up to something in Convocation; we have to go and vote them down.”’ Lipscomb reports that she got only three votes besides her own, but the position of righteous defiance suited her. At the end of the pamphlet, she ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...

Trespasser

Jon Elster, 16 September 1982

Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond 
by Albert Hirschman.
Cambridge, 310 pp., £20, September 1981, 0 521 23826 9
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Shifting Involvements 
by Albert Hirschman.
Martin Robertson, 138 pp., £9.95, September 1982, 0 85520 487 7
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... the former exploit the latter even though both parties gain from exchange. Also, the reference to John Rawls is misleading. His statement in A Theory of Justice that ‘a departure from the institutions of equal liberty ... cannot be justified or compensated for by greater social or economic advantage,’ was explicitly made within the context of ideal ...

The Contingency of Community

Richard Rorty, 24 July 1986

... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...

Decay-Prone

Stephen Mulhall: The intolerance of liberalism, 22 July 2004

Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 413 pp., £19.95, April 2004, 0 691 09526 4
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... simply; even the distinction I have just made fails to dispel the suspicion of liberal partiality. John Rawls’s reputation is built on his monumental A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. But in later years, he not only refined the details of his account of justice as fairness; he also reconstructed its mode of presentation so that it might illuminate ...

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