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Neal Wood (1922–2003)

Auteur de Cicero's Social and Political Thought

7 oeuvres 83 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

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Neal Wood was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at York University, Toronto.

Œuvres de Neal Wood

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My review of this book appeared in History of Political Thought, vol.XXV, issue 2, Summer 2004, pp.351-2:

Neal Wood: Reflections on Political Theory: A Voice of Reason from the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002, £40)

Neal Wood had a distinguished career as a scholar and a teacher of the history of political thought, above all at York University, Toronto, with which he was associated for more than thirty-five years and where he was Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar. He was also a supporter of this journal since its inception, and his achievements were justly celebrated in these pages with a special collection of essays in his honour. In Reflections on Political Theory, the last book to be published in his lifetime, Wood sets out the outlines of his approach to his subject, making it an ideal introduction to his own corpus of scholarship on ancient and modern topics in the history of political thought as well as a manifesto on behalf of a certain kind of methodology.

“This is an unashamedly old-fashioned book", Wood proclaims at the outset, drawing attention to his focus on the state, to the importance of understanding the social and material contexts in which political texts are produced, and to what he calls the “critical and subversive power" of political theory. His most extended discussion of these latter two topics is reserved for the final two chapters of the book, six and seven; the book's first half, devoted to the question of “defining political theory", begins with a chapter defending the claim that the distinctive disciplinary concern of politics revolves around getting to grips with the phenomenon of the state, which Wood presents on the one hand as being characterised by “domination, interest, inequality, violence, fear and ideology" and on the other hand as “the cradle of civilized life" in broadly Hobbesian terms.

The remainder of the book’s first half then consists of two chapters that continue the attempt to generalise about political theory across history. The first of these delineates aspects of the genre of political theory writing, with Wood distinguishing generative, prescriptive and persuasive elements. The first of these refers to whatever it is that grips a particular author and moves him or her to write about politics in the first place; the second to the stance of the theorist as a practical “Reformer of politickes"; and the third to the means by which the author seeks to bring the reader around to his or her point of view, with Wood distinguishing the political theoretical texts with which he is concerned from other kinds of political writing by their particular focus on a certain kind of reasoned justification. The following chapter makes a bold but not wholly persuasive argument about the historical “conditions favouring political theory", suggesting that a combination of acute social crisis, relatively free speech and optimism about the future tend to produce the most interesting kind of political theory texts. Wood’s argument here proceeds negatively, as he tries to use these factors to explain the lack of a robust tradition of Roman political theory (itself a controversial, underdefended claim).

The second half of the book turns to a consideration of rival methodologies for the study of the history of political thought, and it is here that the argument of the book is least convincing. Wood seeks to divide scholars into those who pursue a “philosophical" or “idealist" approach, which is bad, and those who pursue a “historical" or, sometimes, “Marxist" approach, which is better. But the attack on the “philosophical" approach is often vague. We are told that this is the dominant tendency in the academy today, but it is not clear whether Wood refers only to the Anglophone universities, or means to include the rest of the world as well. Nor is it quite clear to whom he is referring. Straussians and analytical philosophers, for example, are two groups who tend to avoid using much history when they attempt to interpret the argument of old books, but they have quite different reasons for doing what they do, and if they are going to be lumped together under a generic critique, it is worth being explicit about this.

We will be in for a surprise, however, if we think that Wood in these pages is restating the kind of argument Quentin Skinner made in his classic 1969 essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas�? – against the consideration of “timeless questions", in favour of an historical, contextualising approach, and so on. In Wood’s view, Skinner and the so-called Cambridge School do not merely belong in the “philosophical" rather than the “historical" camp; they are, he implausibly maintains “more idealistic than Plato’s idealism". It is here that the argument treads on very thin ice indeed; for while there is some merit in the charge that the Cambridge approach encourages “episodic" analyses of politics (Cary J. Nederman’s phrase), Wood’s claim that it neglects the material contexts of history is overstated, as is his occasional charge that the Cambridge scholars are unable to deal with any kind of historical evidence apart from written texts (think of Skinner on the Lorenzetti frescoes, for example); and his remarks about the postmodern tendencies of Cambridge scholarship are crude. Wood’s decision to paint his picture of the Cambridge approach with a very broad brush, furthermore, means that he is unable to engage the corpus of scholarship it has produced in interesting detail; and when he does discuss one particular author’s work at the end of the book, it is merely to restate the chief elements of his ongoing and not especially fruitful running polemic with his fellow Canadian historian of political thought, James Tully, on the matter of John Locke and the justification of capitalism. Rather than his overdrawn Cambridge-Bad, Marxism- Good analysis, it might have been more satisfying to present Cambridge and Marxist approaches as two different kinds of historical analysis, seeking to promote a constructive engagement between these two standpoints by exploring the extent to which each might be able to correct the characteristic limitations of the other.

CHRISTOPHER BROOKE
Magdalen College, Oxford
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
chrisbrooke | Oct 1, 2005 |

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Œuvres
7
Membres
83
Popularité
#218,811
Évaluation
½ 3.5
Critiques
1
ISBN
17

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