Essays for John Dunn - "Political Judgment"

Political Judgement
Essays for John Dunn

Edited by Richard Bourke & Raymond Geuss

(Cambridge University Press, 2009)

368 pages


Description

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.

Contents

Introduction - Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss

Part I. The Character of Political Judgement
1. What is Political Judgement? - Raymond Geuss
2. Sticky Judgement and the Role of Rhetoric - Victoria McGeer and Philip Pettit
3. Theory and Practice: The Revolution in Political Judgement - Richard Bourke

Part II. Trust, Judgement and Consent
4. On Trusting the Judgement of our Rulers - Quentin Skinner
5. Adam Smith's History of Law and Government as Political Theory - Istvan Hont
6. Marxism in Translation: Critical Reflections on Indian Radical Thought - Sudipta Kaviraj

Part III. Rationality and Judgement
7. Pericles' Unreason - Geoffrey Hawthorn
8. Accounting for Human Actions: Individual Agency and Political Judgement in Montaigne's Essais - Biancamaria Fontana
9. Nehru's Judgement - Sunil Khilnani

Part IV. Democracy and Modern Political Judgement
10. Democracy, Equality and Redistribution - Adam Przeworski [paper]
11. Democracy and Terrorism - Richard Tuck

Bibliography of the works of John Dunn.

John Dunn is a emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King's College, Cambridge. His latest book is Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (Atlantic, 2006).