Noble Science and Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge Paperback Library)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Edition, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521277709, ISBN10: 0521277701
Paperback, 396 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
In this unusual and important work, three well-known historians of ideas examine the diverse forms taken in nineteenth-century Britain by the aspiration to develop what was then known as a 'science of politics'. This aspiration encompassed a more extensive and ambitious range of concerns than is implied by the modern term 'political science': in fact, as this book demonstrates, it remained the overarching category under which many nineteenth-century thinkers grouped their attempts to achieve systematic understanding of man's common life. As a result of both the over-concentration on closed abstract systems of thought and the intrusion of concerns which pervade much writing in the history of political theory and of the social sciences, these attempts have since been neglected or misrepresented. By deliberately avoiding such approaches, this book restores the subject to its centrality in the intellectual life and political culture of nineteenth-century Britain.
1. The governing science
things political and the intellectual historian
2. The system of the North
Dugald Stewart and his pupils
3. Higher maxims
happiness versus wealth in Malthus and Ricardo
4. The cause of good government
Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals
5. The tendencies of things
John Stuart Mill and the philosophic method
6. Sense and circumstances
Bagehot and the nature of political understanding
7. All that glitters
political science and the lessons of history
8. The clue to the maze
the appeal of the Comparative Method
9. Particular polities
political economy and the historical method
10. The ordinary experience of civilised life
Sidgwick and the method of reflective analysis
11. A separate science
polity and society in Marshall's economics.