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Wilkinson’s experiences of the early 1930s furnished her with a renewed revolutionary outlook. The rise of fascism in Germany and across Europe brought about a second radicalisation of her political thought. She once again talked explicitly of the need for revolution. Yet the grounds for this changed. In the early 1920s, Wilkinson impatiently condemned the futility of reformism, optimistically expecting imminent revolution, spreading from the youthful Soviet Union. In the 1930s, darker horizons of crisis, fascism and the threat of war rendered revolution necessary. Partly, this was premised upon her travels to the US which provided the most dramatic illustration of modern capitalism and its failings, including that of a New-Deal style rescue. Her odyssey also traversed moments of hope and the revolutionary potential of mass mobilisation in Paris, Flint and Asturias. The events of the 1930s, however, loosened the moorings of Wilkinson’s second radicalisation. By the end of the decade, there was a marked drift in her ideas showing that her second radicalisation was a temporary phenomenon as she had to grapple with the great dilemmas that confronted activists who were against both fascism and war.
F. G. Bailey has likened himself to the fox, who has many ideas, as contrasted to the hedgehog, who has but one (and supposedly defends it with bristling spines). However, this is not to say that there is no coherence in his writings from the 1950s into the 21st century. Over decades, he has developed a sophisticated and ever-refined repertoire of terms and axioms applicable and adaptable for the analysis of social action in general – famously, he was among the first scholars to speak of political ‘arenas’. With his model of actors struggling not only over substantial prizes but also over the very rules of the political game, F. G. Bailey has always remained epistemologically modest, basing his analyses on observed behaviour and plausible inference, culturally grounded but always assuming a very humanistic unity of mankind. His eventual turn towards rhetorical persuasion as a prime vehicle of social action opens a window into his very conception of human nature. Drawing on a thorough reading of F. G. Bailey’s theoretical corpus, this chapter summarizes his proverbial toolkit to demonstrate how the various parts interlock and offer an accessible middle-range approach to interaction and conflict. It ends on a reflection on the position of F. G. Bailey’s work in the patchy history of political anthropology. A discussion of three critics of his approach serves to underline the specific strengths of the toolkit, with its universalist ambitions. Operating at a level of abstraction less fashionable today, as the postmodern drift of political anthropology has rerouted disciplinary interest away from political action to political form and eventually political thought, it might not receive fair and adequate representation in current textbooks, but still remains an inspiring and cohesive contribution to not only interaction, but social theory.
an obvious case in point: while the two seem natural and inseparable allies today, the majority of nineteenth-century liberals blended their acceptance of, even support for, more democratic practices with apprehension about its consequences. Liberal political thought has always been in part a vision of international relations, but this is similarly not fixed: intuitively it is often thought of in terms of peace and prosperity, but as the post-Cold 1 Introduction War era has demonstrated, liberals are perfectly capable of endorsing a bellicose approach to
1964a; 1964b; 1964c; 1966; 1967; 1998 [1972] ). The second is that the problems this creates, both epistemological and normative in nature, illustrate the benefits of a value pluralist approach to political thought more generally and to our understanding of freedom more specifically, an approach that owes a great deal to the work of Isaiah Berlin (see Berlin, 2004 [1958] ; Williams, 1965 ; Fives 2017 ). As we shall see below in much greater detail, my interpretation of Shklar's work is a novel and even a controversial one. Others draw attention
Quentin Skinner recently pointed out that his work builds on that of an earlier distinguished Cambridge historian of political thought, John Neville Figgis (1866–1919). ‘I tried to show that the relevant theories of authorization
were effectively crushed by the republican authorities, but their writings helped to develop the language and arguments which enabled a king to be tried for high treason, and their mobilization of their supporters made such radical tendencies visible on the streets of London as well as on the bookstalls. Revisionist treatments of the Levellers and the later 1640s cannot wipe out the contribution of the Levellers to the radicalization of parliamentarian political thought. But the actual contribution of the Levellers to radicalization where it really mattered – in the
my own. 2 M. Goldie, ‘The English System of Liberty’, in M. Goldie and R. Wokler (eds), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 40–78. 3 For an overview of this period of French history see C. Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). 4 See in particular Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. A. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
, 18 February 2001; also see D. Healey, Time of My Life, London, Michael Joseph, 1989, p. 329; D. Healey, ‘The death of a singularly civilised man: Lord Jenkins of Hillhead’, Financial Times, 6 January 2003; R. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, London, Macmillan, 1991, p. 217. 7 See G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History, third edition, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997, pp. 235–55. 8 C. A. R. Crosland, A Social Democratic Britain, London, Fabian Society, 1971; C. A. R. Crosland, Socialism Now and Other Essays, London, Jonathan Cape, 1974, pp. 34, 44. 9
eurozone can be traced to the same underlying ‘conceptual deficit’: a dearth of postnational political thought. A reluctance to transcend the nation-state as a frame of reference has characterised elites as well as European populations – only a minority of key players (the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa3, for example) have stated this to be a problem. 98 H A critical theory of European integration Social modernity at the level of the EU was the theme of chapters 1 to 4, a survey of Habermas’s political journalism guiding the theoretical
did not shift radically until the Plan of Education, his incorporation of politics, religion and political economy to solve social maladies were prominent in Cyrus and the Plan. Two important consequences emerge from Ramsay’s works for the history of political thought. The first was his relationship with and impact on Fénelon’s legacy as a political theorist. For many years, commentators on Fénelon supposed that Ramsay’s work and biography replicated the Archbishop’s political principles. This was not the case and their diametrically opposed views on the public