Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn

by Edited by Richard Bourke , Raymond Geuss

• ISBN13: 9780521764988
• ISBN10: 052176498X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

From Plato to Max Weber, the attempt to understand political judgement took the form of a struggle to define the relationship between politics and morals. This book by leading international scholars in the fields of history, philosophy and politics restores the subject to a place at the very centre of political theory and practice. Whilst it provides a range of perspectives on the theme of practical reason, it also explores a series of related problems in philosophy and political thought, raising fundamental questions about democracy, trust, the nature of statesmanship, and the relations between historical and political judgement. In the process, the volume reconsiders some classic debates in political theory about equality, authority, responsibility and ideology and offers new and original treatments of key figures in the history of political thought, including Thucydides, Montaigne, Locke, Smith, Burke and Marx.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. viii
Introduction	p. 1
The character of political judgement	p. 27
What is political judgement?	p. 29
Sticky judgement and the role of rhetoric	p. 47
Theory and practice: the revolution in political judgement	p. 73
Trust, judgement and consent	p. 111
On trusting the judgement of our rulers	p. 113
Adam Smith's history of law and government as political theory	p. 131
Marxism in translation: critical reflections on Indian radical thought	p. 172
Rationality and judgement	p. 201
Pericles' unreason	p. 203
Accounting for human actions: individual agency and political judgement in Montaigne's Essais	p. 229
Nehru's judgement	p. 254
Democracy and modern political judgement	p. 279
Democracy, equality and redistribution	p. 281
Democracy and terrorism	p. 313
Bibliography of the works of John Dunn	p. 333
Index	p. 344
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