Homage to Political Philosophy: The Good Society from Plato to the Present

Description

This book offers a model introduction to political philosophy, addressing philosophers from Plato to Rawls and Nozick, with each thinker treated as exploring perennial problems. These include ethical truth, free will, the common good, whether God exists, whether America could become a Hobbesian world sovereign, appeals to nature, free speech, the nature of rights, how one can argue with Nietzsche, whether history is predictable, whether the market can be humanized, and assumed genetic differences between races and genders. When a thinker poses a problem not resolvable at that time, (such as racial equality) modern social science and economics are used to provide answers. There are two persistent themes in this book: namely, that a futile search for ethical truth has drained the original image of the good society (Plato and Aristotle) of its rich content, and that the market has replaced justice as the ordering principle of human society leaving philosophers helpless unless they learn economics. Contents List of Figures and Boxes Acknowledgments Preliminaries Chapter One Part I: Two Thousand Years of Essences Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Part II: Three Hundred Years of Trench Warfare Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Part III: Acceptance or Denial Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Part IV: Novelists versus Economists Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight References Name Index Subject Index