Abstract

A collection of essays by Oakeshott, Weldon, Macdonald, Rees, Quinton, Mayo, Bambrough, Gaillie, Williams and Laslett. The preface describes this work as representative of the effort to recover the area of politics and society for philosophy. With the exception of essays by Oakeshott, Gaillie and Laslett, the writings are fairly routine applications of the analytic philosophical position to questions related to politics; these applications might just as easily have been made by anyone familiar with the literature of analytic philosophy. Gaillie, in the most stimulating piece of the group, attempts to show that contemporary society is possessed of a double moral personality in which eighteenth century liberalism and modern socialism are found coexistent in the same individual.--J. E. B.