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Review Essay : Western Political Thought

’We know that the dead are mighty rulers’ is a leading quotation from Freud in Elshtain’s book. The ’mighty’ are men like Plato and Aristotle, the Christian philosophers, Machiavelli, the liberals, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx. The message is the same in Okin’s book: the philosophers in this case Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and J. S. Mill are dead but their ideas are indeed alive. Thus, there is good reason for a study of the history of Western political thought. Elshtain covers more of the ground than Okin here, especially by including St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and also Hegel and Marx. Moreover, she takes more interest in the philosophical tradition than in the individual philosophers. Okin penetrates more deeply into four individual cases, the piece about J. J. Rousseau being the most interesting. But Elshtain, as well as Okin, also strives at relating the ideas to the political and ideological context of today, though in different ways and with varying success. It is interesting to compare the third book, by Stacey & Price, discussing what has happened during the last fifty years, since women in Great Britain got the vote in 1918, with those by Elshtain and Okin. Stacey & Price ask themselves how it