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31-01-2022 | Book Review

Raymond Geuss, Who Needs a World View?

Harvard University Press, 2020, 187 Pp. ISBN: 978–0674245938

Author: Edward Hall

Published in: Society | Issue 1/2022

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Raymond Geuss, Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, is famed for his work in post-Kantian philosophy and political theory. Since 2015, a steady stream of books has appeared – seven by my count, with two more in the pipeline. Many of them, including the volume under discussion here, are collections of essays. This output has made Geuss among the most renowned philosophical essayists alive today. …

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Raymond Geuss, ‘On the Very Idea of a Metaphysics of Right’, in Politics and the Imagination (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 60.

Raymond Geuss, ‘Neither History nor Praxis’, in Outside Ethics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34.

See Thomas Hurka’s review of Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2009): https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/philosophy-and-real-politics/

See Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Political Philosophy (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 65–87.

Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Penguin, 1992); Bernard Williams, ‘Saint Just’s Illusion’, in Making Sense of Humanity: and other philosophical papers 1982–1983 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135–152.

Some of them, like Shklar, directly admonish many so-called liberal states given the cruelties and humiliations they inflict on their most powerless members: see ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.

Fairness demands that I point out that Geuss has published a number of essays on Williams in previous volumes. Unfortunately, they are very uneven. They also refuse to engage with Williams’s political thinking, presumably because Williams sought to defend a version of liberal politics (albeit a non-moralistic, non-Kantian liberalism of fear inspired by the work of people like Shklar, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Constant, and Weber) and Geuss did not consider this worthy of serious consideration at all.

During the writing of this review I became aware that Harvard University Press will be publishing another of Geuss’ books in 2022, titled Not Thinking Like a Liberal. Perhaps the kind of thinkers I have in mind will be seriously engaged with there.

Title: Raymond Geuss, Who Needs a World View?
Harvard University Press, 2020, 187 Pp. ISBN: 978–0674245938
Author: Edward Hall
Publication date: 31-01-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 1/2022
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00672-5

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