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Synopsis
If you take into your hands a book bearing the title Political Philosophy from Plato to Mao, you will most probably expect it to contain expositions and critical analyses of the main political doctrines and arguments of Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Bentham and J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, and perhaps one or two of the 20th century 'theoreticians' of communism and fascism, ending with Mao Tse-Tung. After all, these thinkers, with the exception of the Great Helmsman, form the accepted organisation of social life, about the make-up of the government, the role and rights of the citizens, the duties and limitations of the state."
Cohen appears to believe that each society, from early antiquity onwards, reflects in the manner of its organisation and in the perennial concerns of its members a set of ideas about what matters to them, what they want, need, hope and value, and how these things connect with the proper constitution, purposes, powers and duties of the state and other political and legal institutions. Philosophers and political thinkers articulate and analyse these 'societal' ideas and they proceed to develop sophisticated proposals as to how the ideas can be realized under the prevailing historical circumstances into concrete political arrangements. Greeks in the 5th century BC, Englishmen and women in the 17th century, workers in advanced industrial countries in the 19th century, and Chinese people in the 20th century all had more or less definite ideas about what was good for them, what constituted their well-being. Plato, Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Engels, and Mao Tse-Tung formulated views as to how their societies should be organized in order to advance the physical and moral welfare of the people. Thus the texts of a handful of remarkable political writers can be read as analyses, commentaries and proposals on issues of importance for their own societies. This fact in turn gives importance to our own efforts to understand and evaluate these texts. This, at least, is what I take to be Cohen's guiding idea for the composition of his book. How does Cohen try to carry his project through? Each successive part of the book is centred around a recognizably important political thinker and his treatment of the issues that preoccupied him and his contemporaries social order, justice, safety, liberty, equality, the function of government or whatever. The social conditions which the thinker lived, and the way they impacted on his political sensibility and threw up the issues which he grappled with are sketched by our author with skill and concision. At the end of each chapter various threads of doctrine and argument are brought together and woven into a brief summary of his 'key ideas'.Cohen's summaries and interpretations of the doctrines of his political philosophers seem to me to be generally reliable and fair - which I suppose only means that his understanding of and responses to these doctrines happen to be more or less similar to mine! No doubt other readers will form different assessments. Something must be said about Cohen's style, which I think it is something of a stylistic achievement: clear, relaxed, jargon-free and often attractively witty. For example, after quoting a passage from Mao in which the latter urged communists to subordinate their interests to those of the nation and the masses and work with whole-hearted devotion to public duty, Cohen adds caustically: "You can see why capitalism became more popular." Unlike the 'Sabine' treatments of the great thinkers which may be found in turgid academic text-books, Cohen does not hide his favour or even admiration for some philosophers and dislike for others. In this regard his book has similarities with the idiosyncratic judgments one finds in the elderly Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, a book which as an undergraduate I read with relish against the advice of my professors. I hope that current undergraduates are offered a more varied and strongly-tasting diet of commentaries, in which Cohen's book would be a valuable item. But I suspect it will be some time before students are asked to deal with the question: "Political power grows through the barrel of a gun. Discuss."Times Higher Education Supplement
...a broad sweep covered with surprising agility and clarity... The central advantages are undoubtably its lucidity, range and unorthodox approach.