In this volume, thirteen distinguished contributors from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany cast light on important aspects of Kant's liberal thinking.

This study looks at the relationship between the two thinkers and demonstrates the viable alternative to Hobbes' orthodoxy that can be found in Kant's political writings. It also shows how Kant anticipated the development of a world-wide political order.

Chapter I MAN IN EAST AND WEST: HIS DIVISION AND HIS UNITY The problems of man in our world in our times are often conceived in terms of the separation ...

In the 1950s and 1960s Freudian theory was deemed to be a vital part of the sociological tradition, but since then it has fallen from favor, largely because of the simplifications and misinterpretations both by Freud's sociological critics and by his supporters. Chief among such misunderstandings is the tendency to view Freud's social theory as a variant of that of Hobbes, in which a selfish and asocial human nature is made social through the imposition of external constraints; these constraints, as (...) Durkheim stated, eventually are "internalized" into the personalities of social beings. Against such a claim this paper argues that Freud's views differ profoundly from those of Hobbes and that the myth of the Hobbesian Freud has so distorted Freud's most fundamental concepts that their social theoretical significance has been largely obscured. (shrink)

Feuerbach would be the first to recognize the importance of Hegel’s philosophy for the development of his own. He would, indeed, readily acknowledge Hegel as his teacher. It was, for example, to attend the lectures of Hegel that Feuerbach first begged his father to allow him to move from Heidelberg University to Berlin University in 1824. It was at Berlin that Feuerbach became a disciple of Hegel, hearing by 1826 all Hegel’s lectures “with the exception of the Aesthetic” and “his (...) Logic twice even.” We have Feuerbach’s word that those lectures made a great impression on him. He says, in a letter to his brother, that he has “already got to the bottom of what was still dark and not understood” with his former teacher, Daub. Daub, who had introduced him to Hegel in his theology lectures at Heidelberg, was but a pale shadow in comparison with the real thing; for, Feuerbach continues, what had previously “smouldered” in his mind had, after hearing Hegel lecture, “flared up” into an exceptionally bright flame. In short, Feuerbach would readily acknowledge that it was the genius of Hegel that first led him to philosophy. (shrink)