Masters of Political Thought I. [antikvár]

"Editor's IntroductionMasters of Political Thought marks a departure from current practice. For undergraduates the medium of instruction in political theory has too often been the comprehensive and encyclopedic text-book. The writers are catalogued and their doctrines summarized, sometimes upon the basis of other and more specialized summaries and not upon the basis of the original works. While the text-book may be indispensable for certain purposes, anything hke exclusive dependence upon it inculcates superficiality.The conventional text-book is more appropriate to some branches of Pohtics than to others. I beheve, for example, that its use is necessary, or at any rate desirable, in the first approach to American government or to international relations, among other courses. Pohtical theory, however, stands apart. It is pecuhar in being tied, in the closest fashion, to the personaUty and genius of the individual thinker, and even to his literary form and his mode of argument. An epitome of Plato's Republic or of Hobbes' Leviathan can be htde more adequate than a paraphrase of Paradise Lost. Two cenmries ago a wise man warned us against treating books like members of the nobility; that is, against learning their titles and bragging afterwards of acquaintance with them. One cannot become acquainted with the Republic by reading what another man thought about it.Ideally die original works should displace the text-book. There would be more intellectual profit in reacling eight or ten such works than in committing to memory a tabulation that brought within its encyclopedic sweep all the pohtical pliilosophers from Plato to Dewey. But the ideal must give way to the practicable. The undergraduate course, according to firmly estabhshed tradition in America, presents a systematic survey of the whole range of theory. Is there, dien, no way of escape from the text-book method ? Some measure of rehef has been afforded by the supplementary use of the source book or book of readings, an anthology or golden treasury of extracts, which establishes a precious contact with the original sources, awakens in persons of discernment a desire to make that contact still more intimate, and so deserves our gratitude. But the source book, aside from the brevityÎ