Otfried Hoffe, Political Justice (Cambridge, UK: PolityPress, 1995), 351 pp., hardcover, $57.95. Reviewed by William L. McBride, Purdue University.

The most impressive aspect of this book is the endorsements on its jacket. There, Jurgen Habermas expresses gratitude for Hoffe’s "having recaptured for philosophy a certain terrain that it has tended, since Hegel, to cede almost unilaterally to jurisprudence." Paul Ricoeur concludes his eulogy with the suggestion that "Hoffe may well be the foremost historian of political and legal philosophy in the Western world today." And Onora O’Neill, slightly more reserved, says that the book’s publication in English "should put pay to any belief that political philosophy in English and in German are mutually inaccessible."-proponents of a thesis of radical untranslatability, I presume.

The "philosophy since Hegel" remark by Habermas, whom in the book itself Hoffe criticizes, among other things, for "ignor[ing] the question whether there are moral obligations the recognition of which human beings owe to one another" (p. 12) and for having a place in his overall philosophical project for "neither human rights nor the human duties which correspond to them" (p. 290), demonstrates that in any case he probably does not qualify for Ricoeur’s "foremost historian" accolade. But then neither, in my opinion after having read the book, does Hoffe: the conclusion of the blurb by Ricoeur, who in the previous sentence of it shows a familiarity with at least some of Hoffe’s other work (on Kant) that is unmatched by any reciprocal recognition in Hoffe’s text, is simply fatuous. Ricoeur, whose own work is generally anything but fatuous, shares with O’Neill, whose extension of Kantian thinking to issues in global ethics has shown a creativity and sense of contemporaneity that one will seek in vain in the present work, the negative distinction of going unmentioned even in the book’s extensive, though uneven, bibliography.

The usually unexamined question of the ethics of book-jacket blurbs is a dicey one. Habermas-who, by the way, does write from time to time about human rights and duties, and who is known to favor consensus over combat-was perhaps carried away by the enthusiasm of Hoffe’s sometimes militaristic approach (e.g., "The theory of justice was compelled to fight on two fronts, and its victory was made possible by a single strategy," p. 286) to say what he did about ceding and recapturing terrain. Ricoeur has written very interestingly about self-sacrifice. There are, in short, other, perhaps loftier values than truth in advertising to be considered. Nevertheless, philosophy teachers wishing to know whether to adopt a text for their students or make it central to their background research often do look to such endorsements as these for initial guidance.

Now let me turn directly to the book behind the mask. It is not a great book, but it is not a dreadful one, either. It seeks to establish, through its three main sections, a fairly simple point, namely, that Herrschaft-the translator, Jeffrey C. Cohen, chose deliberately to leave this key word in German (a small piece of evidence, perhaps, for the untranslatability thesis)-is a necessary part of human social life, that this is a morally correct position to take, and that the sort of Herrschaft that is ultimately needed is political, i.e., the state. Part I (the first warfront mentioned in my earlier citation) does battle with the amoralist orientation of "political and legal positivism", Part II (the second front) combats anarchism as a social principle, and Part III strategically combines the first two in order to strike a lance, so to speak, for a coercive political order.

Along the way, one finds discussions of such writers as Hans Kelsen, H.L.A. Hart, John Rawls, Thomas Hobbes (the subject of one of Hoffe’s earlier books), Plato, and Aristotle. There is in fact very little detailed discussion of Kant, despite the emphasis placed by both Ricoeur and O’Neill on Hoffe’s Kantian proclivities. The nub of the central argument that, as a Kantian bon mot which Hoffe borrows as the title of a short sub-section (pp. 281-285) would have it, "even a nation of devils needs a state" consists of a demonstration that conflict necessarily arises out of the very fact of free beings living together in society and that there results a need to regulate each one’s exercise of that freedom through a "second- order", political, institution.

A philosophy teacher who is most interested in getting his or her students to analyze a sustained conceptual argument along these lines might consider adopting this book; I could not strongly recommend it to others. For one thing, the German original was published in 1987, so that the book contains no references to the turns that the philosophical literature on justice was beginning to take at that time and has taken since then-e.g., communitarian, feminist, postmodern, Levinasian, the later Rawls with his more local, less ambitious narrative about liberalism, and so on. Hoffe considers claims about the importance of economics for politics and political theory to be greatly exaggerated, so there is very little discussion of pro-Marxist, pro-capitalist, or other approaches that are based on the opposite assumption. Nor, as I have already indicated in contrasting Hoffe with O’Neill, is there any nod in the direction, which I regard as particularly important today, of considering global dimensions of justice beyond the limits of the nation-state-a direction in which Kant’s own legal philosophy, it should be recalled, took pioneering steps.

In a sense, Hoffe would not be as concerned as I am about such omissions. For, while his style of argumentation is not highly formalistic, he is one of those who believe that neither political nor moral philosophy is entitled to go very "far beyond our inquiry into basic foundational matters" (p.308), into the contingent realms of history and culture-a still quite widespread belief that has always seemed to me un-warranted, although, as Hoffe notes in passing (p. 260), it is shared to a considerable extent by Habermas himself. Habermas has, nevertheless, written extensively about current issues of public policy; in Political Justice, on the other hand, the very mention of such issues is rare.

Moreover, despite appearances to the contrary (e.g., on the infamous book jacket and in the Table of Contents), this book contains relatively little by way of careful, sustained discussion of rival theories. This may be verified by referring to the (average-sized) Index at the end. For instance, although Hoffe dismisses utilitarianism at several points for its "legitimation deficit" (Index, p. 350)-i.e., its alleged inability to offer a moral argument in favor of state-coerced justice-and lists two volumes of Political Economy and three other standard works by John Stuart Mill in his bibliography, his only two references to Mill are incidental, peripheral one-liners, and so the reader never sees Hoffe try to come to grips directly and in detail with the response that either Mill or any other utilitarians, for that matter, have to offer to this claim.

The tendency to wave a hand instead of taking opponents seriously is especially obvious in Hoffe’s treatment of anarchism, ostensibly the focus of his book’s 130-page middle section. This section includes a chapter on Plato, the majority of which is, somewhat oddly, focused on the very brief sketch of an elementary society that Socrates offers in the Republic, and one on Aristotle, who is questionably said (p. 177) to hold that "no alternative is legally or politically superior to "constitutional democracy, the modern term for his "polity", and that "in the polis, to which. . . human beings [are] brought by nature, citizens are peers, irrespective of their possessions or income, like members of the British House of Lords, the Confreres of the French Academy, or the ‘ordinaries’ of the classic university." But Kropotkin is cited only for one sentence of his definition of "anarchism" in the Encyclopedia Britannica (pp. 130-131), Max Stirner and Bakunin are referred to in the following paragraph along with Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Moses Hess, Marx, and Engels, and the next paragraph after that simply names Herbert Marcuse, R. P. Wolff, and a few other figures said to have had anarchistic tendencies, together with appropriate parenthetical references to the bibliography. That single page is the sum of references to these thinkers, except for Proudhon, Marx, and Engels, who are mentioned briefly in a few other passages.

The beginning section on political and legal positivism, while it does pay somewhat greater attention to Hans Kelsen (though not to his alternative and preferred "hypothesis" of an international legal order, which has always seemed to me to place his ethical noncognitivism in a very different light) and H.L.A. Hart and contains an interesting though rather ambivalent chapter discussing natural law, is also quite limited in its range of references to other writers. For example, Chaim Perelman’s very significant logical critique of theories of justice receives a passing, incongruously friendly reference (three lines on p. 24), and the Italian legal positivist Norberto Bobbio is cited (p. 54) for a 1959 argument to the effect that natural law is "disarmed" when it comes to defending state power, whereas his later, bitter denunciation of the state as naked force and violence goes, of course, unmentioned. But there is no reference at all to Bobbio’s friend and colleague at Turin, intellectual rival, and natural law defender, A.P. d’ Entreves, nor indeed to any of the rest of the vast literature by modern Italian and Francophone writers on both sides of this topic, nor to the important Scandinavian legal positivists, nor to the natural law theory of Lon Fuller to which, along with that of d’ Entreves, Hart addressed himself, nor. . . . Basta. Of course, every writer must pick and choose her or his focal points and secondary literature, and no book should be condemned for failing to meet an impossibly high standard of comprehensiveness. But I have thought it important, especially for the readership of this newsletter, to indicate here some of this book’s limitations and disappointments relative to the "hype" which (literally) surrounds it.

Steven M. Cahn, Editor. Classics of Modern Political Theory: Machiavelli to Mill (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, l977), xii + l022 pp. Reviewed by Ramon M. Lemos, University of Miami.

This massive anthology is an analogue to Professor Cahn’s earlier widely used giant anthology, Classics of Western Philosophy. Just as the earlier anthology provided in one volume a wealth of material from which teachers of courses in introductory philosophy and the history of philosophy can choose, this new anthology does the same thing for teachers of courses in modern political theory. It contains selections from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Burke, Bentham, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx and Engels, and John Stuart Mill. Some works are included in their entirety. These are Machiavelli’s Prince, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (although Rousseau’s sometimes important notes are omitted) and Social Contract, Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party, Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Mill’s On Liberty. With one important exception to be mentioned in a moment, the rest of the volume consists of selections from various well-known writings of the authors indicated above. The selections are presented in chronological order with one understandable exception, that being that the selections from Marx and Engels follow that from Hegel and precede those from Mill. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the final selection in the volume is from Mill’s The Subjection of Women.

The exception mentioned above is that the volume also includes the complete texts of the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and ten of The Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Six of these ten papers are generally ascribed to Madison, the other four to Hamilton. The inclusion of the texts of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution, and especially of the ten Federalist Papers, adds considerably to the value of the anthology. Studying them carefully might help students to come to understand that the United States is greatly fortunate to have had as its founding fathers men of such extraordinary wisdom as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and others and that it is unlikely that any other nation in the history of the world has had at the founding of its political institutions men as great as these. Certainly in this country we have not had since their time a gathering of statesmen whose eminence rivals theirs.

The selections from each of the authors included in the anthology are introduced by scholars familiar with the writings of the author in question. Roger D. Masters, for example, introduces the selections from Machiavelli, Jean Hampton the selections from Hobbes, Bernard E. Brown the selections from The Federalist Papers, Burleigh T. Wilkins the selec-tions from Burke, and so on. The introductions typically are four or five pages long, begin with a brief biography of the author of the selections, move on to a brief account of the views of the author, and conclude with a brief bibliography of books, and sometimes journal articles, dealing with the work of the author. Most of the bibliographies mention only very recent work and ignore earlier studies that in many instances are more important than the works listed. It would have been better had a more complete bibliography on each author been provided at the end of the volume.

With a few exceptions, the selections are made judiciously. One such exception concerns Kant. Were I to choose selections for such a volume from his writings on political philosophy, I would replace Perpetual Peace with selections of comparable length from The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals, the second part of which is The Metaphysical Elements of Virtue. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice presents a more complete and systematic statement of Kant’s political philosophy and philosophy of law than any of his other writings, and properly made selections from this work would provide a better general view of these aspects of his philosophy than can be obtained from the frequently excerpted and reprinted Perpetual Peace. Students whose knowledge of Kant’s political thought is derived mainly from Perpetual Peace might come to view him as an impractical visionary utopian rather than as the realistic political and legal thinker he reveals himself to be in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, a work that also shows more fully than Perpetual Peace his debt to and affinity with various aspects of the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

The most glaring exception, however, to the general judiciousness with which the selections are made is that there is nothing from T. H. Green’s Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. In my view, this work is by far the greatest single work in political philosophy produced in Britain in the nineteenth century and is unquestionably a classic of modern political theory. Since no author later than Mill is included in the anthology, one of the aims of the editor seems to have been to include nothing from the twentieth century. Green, however, died in l882, only nine years after the death of Mill. It is true, as indicated above, that the size of the anthology is gigantic. The inclusion of selections from Green, however, need not increase its length, provided that certain selections be shortened somewhat. I offer a few suggestions.

The selection consisting of Rousseau’s Social Contract could be shortened without sacrificing to any extent at all the intelligibility of his presentation of his own political philosophy by eliminating Chapters 4 and 5 of Book IV, which discuss the nature and history of certain Roman institutions. The same is true of the selection from Hegel. This selection consists of the Introduction and the third part of The Philosophy of Right, on ethical life, the longest by far of the three major parts, the first and second of which deal respectively with abstract right and morality. The editor of this selection wisely includes the explanatory notes Hegel subjoined to many of his short numbered paragraphs, many of which would be unintelligible to students were it not for these notes, most of which are surprisingly clear, given the frequent difficulty of Hegel’s at times opaque style, and some of which (especially those dealing with the family) are quite beautiful. These notes, however, sometimes contain such matters as discussions of various Roman institutions and of the views of various of Hegel’s contemporaries, many of whom would no longer be remembered were it not for Hegel’s discussion of them. As in the case of Rousseau, the deletion of these discussions would not in the least constitute an impediment to the student’s coming to understand Hegel’s own philosophical views. By making deletions such as these from these and other selections, room could be made for the inclusion of selections from Green’s great work without increasing in the least the length of the anthology. Perhaps suggestions such as these could be taken into account should a second edition of this excellent anthology be prepared.

William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Eastern and Western Thought, New and Enlarged Edition, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1996. xiv + 856 pp. No index or bibliography. Reviewed by Jerome Gellman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

This book should be withdrawn from publication and its copies recalled, and should be re-issued only after undergoing massive re-editing. A person who publishes a dictionary, of any kind, has an obligation to the reader to make every effort that the work be as accurate and as representative of the subject as is humanly possible. To this end, experts in the relevant fields should take part in the preparation of the work. This dictionary seems to have been the work of a single person, and while the undertaking is stupendous, the results are unacceptable.

The book contains many mistakes, errors of omission, and superfluous or uninformative entries, while ignoring important subjects for which there are no entries or mention.

We are given, on page 1, an entry that reads simply, "Abarbanel." The name is "Isaac Abarbanel." On page 3, the entry "Abortion" reads as follows: "Q.V. Dworkin (4)." That’s it. Under "Dworkin" we find that he was against legislation on abortion. On page 11, we find an entry, "Akiba, Ben Joseph," and reference on page 65 to the prominent Rabbi, "Ben Joseph Akiba." The Rabbi the author has in mind was Akiba son of ("ben") Joseph, not one whose first name was "Ben." The entry on biblical criticism on page 76 makes no mention of Wellhausen. On page 100, we are given the acronym "ARL" for the kabbalist, Isaac Luria. It is "ARI." This is repeated on page 348. There are two separate entries for Isaac Luria, neither of which refers to the other. In the entry on page 433, we are told that Isaac Luria lived in Safed, Afghanistan. Safed is in the Galilee, in northern Israel. On page 109, we are told that "Catechism" refers to essential religious instruction in question and answer form, as in Jewish and other religious instruction. There is no Jewish catechism. On page 127, it says that W.K. Clifford maintained that one was not to believe something unless "all the evidence points to its truth." This is false. Clifford requires adequate evidence, which is compatible with there being some counter-evidence. On page 205 we are given the false statement that generally rationalism is identified with the coherence theory of truth. The entry on epistemology, pages 205-6, ignores entirely the debate over internalism and externalism in epistemology. On pages 219-20 we are told that the existential quantifier is: "The notation used in Existential Generalization and Existential Instantiation." This is uninformative and inadequate. On page 229 we find this entry for Feminism: "Q.v. Simone de Beauvoir; Mary Daly." That’s it. Elsewhere, each of these thinkers gets a quarter of a page, less space than that given to Samuel Pufendorf. On page 257 we are told that in his famous paper, Edmund Gettier used a counterexample having to do with a sheep in the field. This is not Gettier’s example. It is Chisholm’s. In the same entry we find this: "When one says of a certain person S that at a certain time t one knows that a certain statement h is true. . . One believes that h is true, h is true, and it is evident to S that h is true." This is thoroughly confused. On page 276, there is an entry for grue! (There is none for bleen.) Two different dates appear for the birth of Judah Halevi, one on page 280 and the other on page 366. On page 285 the reader learns that Hasidism began in Poland. It didn’t. It began in Ukraine. And we are told that through Ravel and Bloch, Hasidism helped shape the music of the Jewish community. Ravel and Bloch may have done many things, but here they are marginal, at best.

Despite what is written on page 300, Hillel the Elder did not write a work entitled "Maxims." On page 318 we are told that the a priori argument in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is the ontological argument. Not so. The argument described in that work as "a priori" is Demea’s cosmological argument. The ontological argument does not appear in that work. On page 325 we read that 150 of the poems of Abraham Ibn Ezra "found their way into" the Jewish prayer book. If that statement is at all true, all but a handful must have felt quite lost there, for they found their way out very quickly. On page 328, we learn that Richard Rorty did not require "an exact translation between the mental state and the brain state," where, of course, the translation is between sentences, not states. On pages 337-8, math-ematical induction is given a grossly mistaken formulation. On page 349, mention is made of the "two most powerful" groups of Islamic philosophy, the Mutazilites and the Mutakillim, but nowhere in the work are we told anything about the teachings of the latter.

On page 367 we are informed that the Kabbalists were opposed to the Talmud. This is false. We are also told that Buber was a "product" of Hasidism. This is historically untrue. On page 370 it says that the Jewish Kaddish prayer has the same opening words as the Lord’s Prayer. The Kaddish does not open with "Our Father who art in heaven." On page 385, the author informs us that Kripke’s contribution to Wittgenstein studies was in seeing that Wittgenstein held there could not be rule-following without a community. For this we did not need Kripke.

On page 535, we are told that Descartes presented the same two versions of the ontological argument as did Anselm. Not so. On page 554, we are told that the holiday of Passover begins on the fourteenth of the month of Nisan. It starts on the fifteenth. On page 583 the author misinterprets Alvin Plantinga’s treatment of the problem of evil. It is not a theodicy. On page 636 we find the following entry for Rationality: "Q.v. Rescher (8)." That’s the extent to which the concept of rationality is covered in this dictionary. On page 658, we are told that Richard Rorty contributed to the "ceremonies of analytic philosophy." I can’t understand why I have never been invited-I’m an analytic philosopher. On page 755, we learn that the term "Talmud" comes from the Hebrew word "talmuda." The latter is Aramaic, not Hebrew. And on page 776 we find that "Torah" comes from the Hebrew, "turath." I’ll bet you money it doesn’t.

On pages 780-781, we find that transitivity is that: "the relation x has to y and y to x, x must likewise have to z. A misprint, no doubt. On page 795 we are told what the universal quantifier is: "The notation used in Universal Generalization and Universal Instantiation." This is neither informative, nor adequate. The entry on "Verstehen," on page 816, fails to mention the importance of that term for Hegel. On page 846, we are told that "Yahweh" was originally written, "YHWH," without the vowels, as a sign of reverence. Uh-uh. Originally, all Hebrew was written without the vowels. There are entries for the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, but not for Abraham or Moses.

Finally, the author is inconsistent in the way he regards his entries. For example, "Levellers" and "Zionism" are given as terms referring to movements, while "Post-Structuralism" is said to be a movement. "Vitalism" is offered as a name and "Sensationalism" a term, but "Psychologism" is said to be a "doctrine." "Logic" is a "theory," but "Metaphysics" a term. And so on.

• Letter from the Editors
• Articles
  • Compromising Standards, Jonathan E. Adler
  • Three Courses in Philosophy of Religion, Michael Martin
  • Values Analysis: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Ethics, Charles Ess
  • Pre-college Philosophy Teaching as a Career Option, David Martens and Hugh Taft-Morales
  • A Syllabus for a Course on Virtue, Beth Singer
  • Ze, Zer, Mer, Richard E. Creel
• Book Reviews
  • A Hobbes Dictionary, Reviewed by Joseph Filonowicz
  • Political Justice,  Reviewed by William L. McBrid
  • Classics of Modern Political Theory: Machiavelli to Mill, Reviewed by Ramon M. Lemos
  • Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Eastern and Western Thought, Reviewed by Jerome Gellman
  • The Nationalism Reader, Reviewed by August Viglione
  • Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, Reviewed by Ursula Niklas
• List of Books Received
• News and Notes
• Addresses of Contributors