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Comment on McCloskey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Martin Diamond
Martin Diamond
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

McCloskey's essay offers a justification for and an approach to the study of American political thought. Justification is needed, as he puts it bluntly and persuasively, because American political thought is second-rate. His proposed approach to its study constitutes a solution to the problem posed by that second-rateness. That is, he offers not just one possible valuable way to consider American political thought but, rather, the way which justifies the study.

The justification for studying second-rate thought, he tells us, cannot be the same as that for first-rate political thought. To use his example, the study of Plato can be defended on the ground that it is somehow “intrinsically self-warranting.” He distinguishes another major justification for the study of first-rate thought, namely, its relevance to the understanding of politics, that is, presumably, to the understanding of politics regardless of time or place. But the study of American political thought, because it is second-rate, cannot be justified on the first ground; the student of American political thought “must stand on the leg of relevance if he is to stand at all.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 130 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1957

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References

1 There is, of course, a modern position which denies that there can be really superior opinions about what men ought to do politically. In that view, all speculation about the right political order—no matter how elegant, systematic, dispassionate—is a rationalization of purely idiosyncratic, and thus arbitrary, preference. From this denial, of course, it would easily follow that American political thought should be studied as American ideology or as only an expression of the American political mind. But I take it McCloskey does not base his thinking dirctly on that modern position and thus I do not feel obliged to challenge it explicitly here.

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