Book Reviews: A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, Natural Right and History, The Age of Absolutism, 1660–1815, Hitler's Europe. Survey of International Affairs 1939–1946, Japan's New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall, 1937–45, European Parliamentary Procedure, Politics in Post-War France: Parties and the Constitution in the Fourth Republic, Administration Et Politique En Allemagne Occidentale, the Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan and Burma, Problems of Public Administration in India, Radical Leicester: A History of Leicester, 1780–1850, the Communication of Ideas, Social Changes in South-West Wales, Social Mobility in Britain, the Neglected Child and the Social Services, Power and Influence, Le Parti Liberal Dans Le Système Constitutionnel Britannique
| Author | Enid Harrison,M. G. Brock,Peter Campbell,Leonard Barnes,George Catlin,Max Beloff,P. A. Bromhead,K. Panter-Brick,K. C. Wheare,J. M. Mogey,A. Cobban,F. G. Carnell,J. W. N. Watkins,Joseph Frankel,David Butler,W. J. H. Sprott |
| Date | 01 February 1955 |
| Published date | 01 February 1955 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1955.tb01108.x |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
BOOK
REVIEWS
A HISTORY
OF
POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE ENGLISH
REVOLUTION.
By
PEREZ
ZAGORIN.
(Routledge and
Kegun
Paul.
Pp.
vii
+
208.
15s.)
Mr. Zagorin is a new recruit to that distinguished line of American scholars, such as Pease,
Sabine, Jordan, and Woodhouse, who have brought the highest standards
of
scholarship to
the study of English political thought during the seventeenth century and especially during
the Revolution. He has produced what was badly needed,
a
first-rate work which carries
on
from where J. W. Allen’s broke
off.
After an Introduction in which he points out that ‘only in the revolutionary years were
men moved to rush into print who had previously brooded in silence over their Bibles and
their grievances’, he devotes two chapters to a compact account of the Levellers, the
development of their ideas and programme. My one small complaint here is that
I
think
that Lilburne’s evolution went farther and was more explicable than Mr. Zagorin suggests.
He then turns to Winstanley, for whom he pitches, and nearly succeeds in substantiating,
the high claim that he was ‘one of the pre-eminent political thinkers of his time’. His analysis
of Winstanley’s simultaneous development towards pantheism and communism is particu-
larly good.
So
much for the late
1640’s.
The next two chapters deal with defenders of the Common-
wealth. Mr. Zagorin has unearthed some forgotten thinkers who put forward quasi-
Hobbesian arguments
in
favour of submission to the
de
jacro
authority in an atmosphere
of tired disillusion. He then considers John Goodwin, and brings out very clearly the
dilemma of a man who justified the Independents’ treatment of the King
on
the ground
of
a popular right to remove unwanted magistrates and who justified the Cromwellian govern-
ment (which he admitted was not popularly wanted)
on
the grounds that it was ‘necessary’
and ‘represented‘ in a peculiar way the people who were now ‘sovereign’ in a peculiar sense.
Mr. Zagorin next considers defenders of the Protectorate, skilfully relating them to the
changed form of government and mood of the country.
Then
comes a chapter
on
the Fifth-
Monarchy-Men which really brings their strange ideas to life, followed by a masterly
analysis
of
Milton (which nevertheless omits a fact which surely seals Milton’s incompetence
as a political thinker, namely his desire that the Army should act as the watch-dog of his
perpetual Senate). This and the next two chapters are concerned with republicans who wrote
when ideas were again
in
a ferment with the impending demise of the Protectorate. He
stresses Harrington’s belief in the economic determination of political power; but Harring-
ton believed even more strongly in the possibility of
political
determination of economic
factors: for all his belief in sociological causation he retained a utopian belief, to which
Mr. Zagorin does less than justice, in the radical and lasting effects of single-minded reform.
In
a long chapter which treats Hobbes with proper seriousness Mr. Zagorin is largely
content to follow Strauss.
I
have one criticism. He says that Hobbes went with Grotius,
though he went farther, in denying ‘the divine origin of moral valuations’. But Hobbes and
Grotius were really
in
direct opposition here. Grotius asserted the autonomy of moral
truths: they would remain if God went. Hobbes denied their autonomy. Mr. Zagorin soft-
pedals Hobbes’s assertion that natural laws are
laws
because commanded by God, but the
idea of
a
moral principle being created by the fiat of a sovereign power fits naturally into
his system. Mr. Zagorin goes on to argue, rightly
I
think, that there is an unresolved conflict
between Hobbes’s belief in the
individual’s
private reason and understanding of natural
law in the state of nature and his belief in their subsequent absorption by the
Sovereign’s
public reason and civil law. Hobbes, he says, was not a genuine absolutist because he could
80
REVIEWS
not make men’s natural rights commit suicide after giving rise to an absolute sovereign.
Since these rights include the ‘contentments of life’
as
well
as
life itself, we have only to
stress their persistence into civil society to transform Hobbes into
a
liberal. Mr. Zagorin
develops this theme in
a
careful and interesting way, and brings his argument to an exciting
finish.
In his last chapter he emphasizes,
as
Allen did, the limited and constitutional claims of
almost all Royalists except Filmer, whose distorted common sense
is
well brought out.
Once or twice Mr. Zagorin lapses into Laski-ese. but his style is mostly sober and plain.
The book
is
well produced, reasonably priced, and highly recommended to students of this
crucial period.
London
School
of
Economics and Political Science
J.
W. N. WATKINS
NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY.
By
LEO
STRAUSS.
(University
of
Chicago
Press;
London,
Cambridge
University
Press.
Pp.
327.
37s.
6d.)
In
1936
Professor Strauss published his
Political Philosophy
of
Hobbes,
a
striking,
if
some-
what paradoxical, book which led the fashion in placing emphasis on the
timor
rnortis
as
the clue to Hobbes’s philosophy, which was depicted as moralistic, while putting Hobbes’s
boast of having founded a hypothetical, but mathematically demonstrable, political science
into the background. Of what we may call the new Chicago school, which
also
comprises
Morgenthau and perhaps Voegelin, all critical
of
the Lockeian-Jefferson typically American
tradition,
Dr.
Strauss is the most outstanding as
a
historian. All mark a sharp departure
from the work of the ‘old Chicago school’ of Dewey, Merriam,
T.
V.
Smith, and Lasswell,
which connected liberalism, empiricism, and positivism in broadly Russellian fashion.
The present study is indeed
a
noble work
of
scholarship and perhaps the most distin-
guished, in its particular field, to come from the American world or even English-speaking
world for some time. Striking
obiler dicta
reward the reader: indications of the essential
clash between the thought
of
Hooker and
of
Locke; that the founder
of
liberalism was
Hobbes, the champion of rights; that Rousseau preached
a
national and untransferable
philosophy, asserted that the philosophy of each people is little apt for another people (a
view of which much is heard today), postulated the crucial natural inequality of men in
intellect, and made his thesis that man is by nature good, only in the sense that he
is
‘by
nature that subhuman being which is capable of becoming either good
or
bad’. No scholar
can afford to overlook these insights, especially as the whole book is written in an excellent,
masculine style, without surplus verbiage.
Much of this book
is,
not a restatement of Natural Law,
so
basic to classical American
thought, but rather an historical survey of the idea of Natural Right, in the ancient period
and from Hobbes to Burke. The treatment owes much
to
the genetic method of Jaeger. The
denial of Natural Rights, Professor Strauss holds, involves us in nihilism and moral indzer-
entism, however obscured by talk about the blessings
of
variety and
of
multiple ‘natural
urges’ as facts. However, ‘the historicist thesis is self-contradictory
or
absurd‘. Maybe it is
an excellent thing that this should be said today when historical and ethical relativism are
all the fashion. Max Weber’s belief that there can be no one known system of the ‘ought’,
or of the good Society, and his historical relativism, are subjected to critical analysis,
as
is
his Kantian ethic of autonomy. Indeed this critique
of
Weber can be regarded as the
raison
d‘zfre
of
the book. The new Chicago school is much troubled by Weber. His particular
separation
of
social facts and social values, based on an unconfessed scepticism about values
(‘war being king’ in his private philosophy), is rightly repudiated, although Professor Strauss
too
readily seems to assume that the criticism will hold
for
all forms of this useful dichotomy
made,
for
methodological reasons, on the basis of hypotheses.
The argument on Natural Rights becomes one about values accepted,
if
not
consensu
omnium,
yet on the basis of what is suggested to be more concrete and valuable, a local
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