Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History

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University of Chicago Press, 1989 M01 15 - 290 páginas
In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J. G. A. Pocock announces the emergence of the history of political thought as a discipline apart from political philosophy. Traditionally, "history" of political thought has meant a chronological ordering of intellectual systems without attention to political languages; but it is through the study of those languages and of their changes, Pocock claims, that political thought will at last be studied historically.

Pocock argues that the solution has already been approached by, first, the linguistic philosophers, with their emphasis on the importance of language study to understanding human thought, and, second, by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its notion of controlling intellectual paradigms. Those paradigms within and through which the scientist organizes his intellectual enterprise may well be seen as analogous to the worlds of political discourse in which political problems are posed and political solutions are proffered. Using this notion of successive paradigms, Pocock demonstrates its effectiveness by analyzing a wide range of subjects, from ancient Chinese philosophy to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Burke.
 

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Contenido

The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought
3
An Essay on the Apparent Political Meanings of Ancient Chinese Philosophy
42
3 Civic Humanism and Its Role in AngloAmerican Thought
80
4 Machiavelli Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century
104
5 Time History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes
148
A Problem in the History of Ideas
202
An Essay on Traditions and their Understanding
233
A SelfCriticism and Afterpiece
273
Derechos de autor

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Acerca del autor (1989)

J. G. A. Pocock is the Harry C. Black Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Among his many books are The Ancient Constitution and the Federal Law and Virtue, Commerce, and History.

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