Origins Of Political Philosophy Research Articles

On Cropsey's World: Joseph Cropsey and the Tradition of Political Philosophy

Throughout his corpus, Joseph Cropsey reflects upon the tradition of political philosophy. Those reflections can be fruitfully approached under four headings. First, Cropsey questions the nature and origins of political philosophy as well as its cosmological or metaphysical foundations. Second, Cropsey questions the customary periodizations of the tradition of political philosophy. He especially questions the usefulness of the ancients-moderns distinction. Third, Cropsey reflects upon the relation between the tradition of political philosophy and concrete political life past and present. In the process, he tries to show the ways in which comprehensive constellations of ideas work their way into and inform everyday life. Fourth, Cropsey reflects upon the nature of the American regime and its prospects for the future. Throughout, it becomes clear that Cropsey has engaged in an ongoing dialogue with his mentor Leo Strauss. Finally, it also becomes clear, contrary to recent assertions made in response toPlato's World, that Cropsey engages in a series of subtle critiques of Nietzschean and Heideggerian historicism and thereby of contemporary postmodernism as well.

Talking in the Marketplace: A “New” Approach to Political Philosophy

The standard approach to teaching political philosophy involves the transmission of a given body of information, organized either historically (Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, etc.) or topically (the state, freedom, equality, human rights, authority, etc.). The aim is to transfer a core of knowledge to the students, whose responsibility is to comprehend the factual material much as they would material in any other course.The historical and topical approaches to political philosophy are useful in that they allow the student to familiarize himself with the great themes of western (or world) civilization, but they have their limitations. The problem of these approaches, to use an expression of Edmund Husserl's is “sedimentation.” The tradition of philosophy is so covered with generations of silt that it is almost impossible to uncover the original experiences that led to the development of philosophy in the first place. To understand Nietzsche you have to understand Marx; to understand Marx you have to understand Hegel; to understand Hegel you have to understand Kant; to understand Kant you have to understand … ad infinitum until we reach … to understand Aristotle you have to understand Plato, and to understand Plato you have to understand Socrates.A second approach to political philosophy is more concerned with encouraging students to engage in philosophical reflection than it is in developing the mastery of scholarship encouraged by the first approach. This second approach returns us to the origins of political philosophy.