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Political Theory and Practice: Eight Essays on a Theme
by Wendell John Coats, Jr.
As this book suggests, sketching the contours of the relationship between human intelligentsia and the evolving course of history involves an identification of the unchanging and changing aspects of human praxis and the practicability of philosophical reflections and their ways and limits of influence on human conduct. The examination of the relationship includes the nature and aims of political theorizing and its interaction with deed, as well as an insight into how the understanding of this relationship has been described by Western political philosophers from Plato to Oakeshott.
In the essays on Plato, Aristotle, Vico and Descartes, Machiavelli, Locke and Descartes, and Marx, the author elaborates philosophers from various points of views, most evidently through an Oakshottian sensibility and the anti-rationalist school of thought, with some echoes of Strauss. His reflections on the theory-practice problem; revisited ideas developed in the earlier chapters, organized and discerned systematic inspection of political intellectual activity sets the main and secondary purposes of thought, subsequent to the main assumptions the inquiry is based on, and claims that one of the prominent roles of theorizing is to develop new terms that clarifies the concepts a civilization refers to, in order to differentiate politics from religion etc, thereby distinguishing the animus dominandi on the 'map of human activity' (p. 114).
Although the author justifies his main thesis that political theory's principle aim is to influence political practice, I find myself unconvinced of why - even at high levels of abstraction - political theorizing usually does not intend to understand for its own sake. Thus, his well-justified argument seems less valid when the counter-argument has been left less criticized. He finally makes a remark on the aims of contemporary political theorizing and similarly leaves the reader unconvinced. Precisely, he claims that today's political theory aims to moderate and/or harmonize human integration and order, with the lack of a convincing explanation of why and how it is different from the Machiavellian instrument of 'concentration of power'. This book definitely deserves scholarly attention, but only from readers with philosophical or theoretical expertise.
In the essays on Plato, Aristotle, Vico and Descartes, Machiavelli, Locke and Descartes, and Marx, the author elaborates philosophers from various points of views, most evidently through an Oakshottian sensibility and the anti-rationalist school of thought, with some echoes of Strauss. His reflections on the theory-practice problem; revisited ideas developed in the earlier chapters, organized and discerned systematic inspection of political intellectual activity sets the main and secondary purposes of thought, subsequent to the main assumptions the inquiry is based on, and claims that one of the prominent roles of theorizing is to develop new terms that clarifies the concepts a civilization refers to, in order to differentiate politics from religion etc, thereby distinguishing the animus dominandi on the 'map of human activity' (p. 114).
Although the author justifies his main thesis that political theory's principle aim is to influence political practice, I find myself unconvinced of why - even at high levels of abstraction - political theorizing usually does not intend to understand for its own sake. Thus, his well-justified argument seems less valid when the counter-argument has been left less criticized. He finally makes a remark on the aims of contemporary political theorizing and similarly leaves the reader unconvinced. Precisely, he claims that today's political theory aims to moderate and/or harmonize human integration and order, with the lack of a convincing explanation of why and how it is different from the Machiavellian instrument of 'concentration of power'. This book definitely deserves scholarly attention, but only from readers with philosophical or theoretical expertise.
Filiz Akgul, Bilkent University, Turkey, Political Studies Review Volume 2 Number 3 September 2004 <Top>
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