[In the following review, Hallowell deems History of Political Philosophy an “excellent and welcome text.”]

Although this book [History of Political Philosophy] is intended primarily to introduce undergraduates to the study of political philosophy, it should be of interest to the general reader who is looking for a similar introduction or who wants to review the history of political philosophy.

It is intended as a guide to the texts, not as a substitute for them. As a work of collaboration it displays both the virtues and the weaknesses of any joint intellectual endeavor. Yet the collaborators share essentially the same presuppositions about the nature of political philosophy and approach the analysis of the thought of particular authors with similar questions.

Political philosophy arises from speculation, first undertaken by the Greeks, about the distinction between nature and convention. It asks whether all “right” is merely conventional or whether some things are right by nature. Since these questions were raised and answered most systematically by Plato and Aristotle, political philosophy is best exemplified, though not exhausted, by their writings. According to the editors of this volume, classical political philosophy “includes also the political teaching of the Stoics as well as the political teachings of the Church Fathers and the Scholasties, in so far as these teachings are not based exclusively on divine revelation.”

It is the political teaching of classical political philosophy that the contributors use as a standard with which to evaluate modern political teaching. This volume differs from some competing textbooks by virtue of the fact that its orientation is more philosophical than historical and that it uses classical political philosophy as a normative standard with which to evaluate political teaching since the 16th century.

Its coverage is much more extensive than that generally found in similar texts. In addition to the usual thinkers whom one finds discussed in such books, chapters are devoted to the thought of Alfarabi, Moses Maimonides, Descartes, Spinoza, William Blackstone, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey. The chapter on Plato by Leo Strauss and that on Aristotle by Harry V. Jaffa are key chapters and are well done. My only complaint is that the authors might have referred to other interpretations if only better to substantiate their own. The work that Eric Voegelin, for example, has done on Plato and Aristotle certainly merits attention, as does that of earlier scholars such as A. E. Taylor.

The suggested readings appended to each chapter might well have included references to works of this kind, particularly since the book is designed for students. This suggestion applies not only to the two initial chapters but to the chapters throughout the book.

It is impossible for a reviewer to comment on each chapter, and some readers will undoubtedly find some analyses more illuminating than others. I found the chapter on Adam Smith by Joseph Cropsey particularly helpful. He points out that, although following in the tradition of Locke, Smith helped bring about a distinct and important change in that tradition. His thesis is that “in its self-understanding, capitalism … anticipated the chief postcapitalistic criticism of capitalism: civil society is a defective solution of the human problem,” and that “the self-understanding of capitalism also anticipated an astonishing proportion of what was to be proposed by the 19th century as the alternative to capitalism.”

I was disappointed in the short chapter (only eight pages) devoted to an analysis of the thought of St. Augustine. It lacks, in my opinion, the perception displayed by Herbert Deane in a recent analysis entitled The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (Columbia Univ. Press, 1963).

On the whole this is an excellent and welcome text. It is much superior to the widely used text of George H. Sabine because it takes political philosophy seriously and he does not. Students who use this volume will be confronted with the questions posed by classical political philosophy, questions that cannot be dismissed as being peculiar to a particular time in human history but are of perennial concern to human beings.