2024.08.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Frederick Neuhouser, Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 386pp., $39.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781009235037.
Reviewed by Pierre Keller, University of California, Riverside
In his deeply interesting new book, Frederick Neuhouser expands the discussion of normative political theory beyond the confines of the pillars that have served as the foci of recent American political theory: justice, social welfare, and moral responsibility. Neuhouser argues that human society is sufficiently comparable to living organisms, and that the notion of social pathology is relevant to the understanding of human society. Neuhouser brings the scrupulousness, care, and methodological assumptions of contemporary analytic political philosophy to themes in social and political thought that have been largely alien to its deeply rooted methodological individualism. The theme of social pathology is one that is central to Plato’s Republic and a theme that Plato takes up from the Greek Sophists and from Thucydides. Thus, the notion of…
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