From Free Life, Issue 28, September 1998
ISSN: 0260 5112

One of the major reasons for the parlous inadequacy of education in the social sciences is the failure - in some cases deliberate - of university teachers to put students in touch directly with the relevant range of original texts and the great minds which produced them.

Two consequences flow from this routine dereliction of academic duty and the second-rate curriculum which it enjoins. Either the undergraduate mentality is dulled and blunted by continuous immersion in some tawdry contemporary textbook (of sociology, political science, or whatever) got up by orthodox mediocrities (no names, no pack drill). Or it is deformed and perverted by biassed initiation into the beliefs and jargon of some fashionable and favoured guru (Derrida, for example, or Foucault, just as earlier it was Althusser or Gramsci).

Bellamy and Ross's book provides a useful corrective to this error. It consists of twelve chapters, each comprising substantial selected extracts from classic social theorists and an essay by one of a team of eleven well known British social scientists (O'Hagan does two chapters). The chapters cover in turn: Socrates and Locke on political obligation; Aristotle and Aquinas on community and natural law; Machiavelli, Milton, and Hobbes on liberty; Locke and Aristotle on property; Rousseau and Wolstonecraft on sexual equality; Kant and Hegel on the state and civil society; Burke and de Tocqueville on conservatism; Rousseau and James Mill on democracy; Marx and Lenin on communism; Bakunin and Kropotkin on anarchism; J.S. Mill and Durkheim on individualism; and Weber and Michels on bureaucracy.

Overall, the book aims to introduce students to the major classic social theorists, to explore the historical contexts of the development of their ideas, and to explain the key concepts of political debate. It grew out of a course on social and political theory taught jointly at the University of East Anglia by philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists. The synergy produced by the multi-disciplinary character of the team is considerable and valuable.

It is a very good book, deserving commendation both as a teaching vehicle and as an introduction or aide-memoire for the general reader. Almost all the essays are excellent. I can find only three faults.

First, the extracts are by no means insubstantial, but one could wish they had been longer. If the book is a commercial success, one might hope that more and longer extracts might be included in a second edition - with the page length extended from 300 plus to 400 plus.

Second, the multi-disciplinary pay-off could have been strengthened still further if one or two economists had been included in the team. After all, contemporary debate world-wide about democracy is substantially shaped by Public Choice Theory.

Third, the conservative wing of political analysis seems to me under-represented, particularly in the modern period. After Burke and de Tocqueville, there is only Michels from the right. Britain's greatest sociologist Herbert Spencer should certainly figure, as should de Maistre and perhaps Gobineau.

David Marsland