The Pursuit of Certainty
David Hume; Jeremy Bentham; John Stuart Mill; Beatrice Webb
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23215554 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Willson H Coates, Shirley Robin Letwin |
| Year | 1966 |
| Volume | 71 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 957 |
| Publication date | 1966-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1846092 |
| OpenAlex | W1984838489 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
By examining thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of gradual change in English-speaking peoples' understanding of what sort of activity politics is. As Letwin writes, the distinctive political issue since eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less. Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of Industrial Revolution or new social conditions [that] aggravated problem of poverty but, Letwin believes, because of profoundly personal reflection of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not. By end of nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to equate triumph of reason over passion with rule of science over human life. Thus did pursuit of displace traditional English understanding of limitations of human nature—hence necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life in quest of philosophical certainty and social perfection. - Project Muse summary.
Aesthetics · Certainty · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics) · Mill · Passion · Perfection · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 1980 - 2018 (39) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |