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Chapter 14 - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Collingwood’s New Leviathan?

from Part II - Issues in Collingwood’s Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2024

David Collins
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge
Christopher Williams
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Reno
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Summary

This uninhibited book of Collingwood’s rounds off his contribution to philosophy in a fiercely personal style. Declaring his unbounded admiration for the Leviathan of Hobbes and following its fourfold structure, Collingwood offers a systematic account of man, society, civilization, and “barbarism” – the last being understood as active hostility towards civilization, or revolt against it. Collingwood’s thoughts on the meaning of “society” and “civility,” as well as on questions of peace and war, remain very much alive; of particular interest here are his distinction between “eristic” and “dialectical” approaches to disagreement, and his conception of a body politic as the scene of a “dialectical” relationship between social and non-social elements. Other discussions impose greater distance on a modern reader – among them his briskly affirmative treatment of the role of a “ruling class,” of our entry into a presumed “social contract,” and of the “intelligent exploitation of nature.”

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Interpreting R. G. Collingwood
Critical Essays
, pp. 262 - 279
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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