Garrett Ward Shelton, ed.

Encyclopedia of Political Thought

New York: Facts on File Inc., 2001, pp. ix + 342, ISBN 0-8160-4351-5 (hardback)

I learnt something from taking an undergraduate course in Political Thought. I learnt that I could not understand Political Thought. As I grappled with the set books, words loomed in front of me, big ones too. I laboriously disentangled them just as I had been trained by the Janet and John books. Sentences continued to swim while I drowned, first in incomprehension and finally in panic. The course accompanied the unfolding of the UDI crisis in Rhodesia. This provided a provocative contemporary angle for the genial conservative who tried to teach me. Plato wanted the gold to rule; he would have been for the settlers. Aristotle restricted citizenship, Machiavelli and Hobbes were brutal about the use of power. No problem with Locke, for the white minority owned the property. Rousseau had no time for majority rule. By the time the exam came around, all I had grasped was that the white Rhodesians were unlucky not to have lived in the previous two millennia. Political Thought was not for me.

But, like it or not, we are all affected by political theory, perhaps most of all when we do not know enough to question it. I simply had to pick up some grasp of the subject just as I came to terms with other puzzling aspects of the human condition - through instinct, deduction from knowing remarks and occasional fumbling experiments of my own. With the Encyclopedia of Political Thought, I finally hoped that I had could find answers to all those questions I had been too shy to ask. In semi-coffee-table format, with pages set in large type and double columns, its fine hard cover decorated with pictures, it brought back reassuring memories of the Beano Annual. Containing over 400 bite-sized entries in user-friendly form, this is definitely a volume for every reference library. Most entries have a note on further reading and there is a brief general bibliography, which includes most of the tomes that foxed me forty years ago.

Broadly, there are two sorts of entry, both of them showing some bias towards the United States. Some deal with concepts, such as abolition (of slavery), abortion, absolutism, activism, alienation. Others discuss people, including Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ('noteworthy in political thought', but for his advocacy of conservative ideas rather than for originality, 254). There is no entry for 'Commonwealth', even though one version of the idea was influential in early America. Each entry is liberally cross-referenced, so that an enquiry about Plato may guide the reader to topics as various as justice, fascism and James Madison. Daringly, I read my way through the topics of that terrifying course of forty years ago, and found the material gently reassuring. Finally, I plucked up my courage to confront that naughtiest of all intellectual experiences: what on earth is all this business about Foucault? There he was, trailing the First Amendment and the Virginia apologist for slavery, George Fitzhugh. I read about his life, his sad death and his views on authority. There the clouds closed in: '… authority cannot be regarded either as a form of action opposed to power or as an institution that merely wields power, but as a mechanism of political management that is composed by the fluid exercise of power throughout society' (110). Professor Sheldon's team have evidently done their best to convey a simple meaning, but I wish they had told us what Foucault thought about the Rhodesia crisis.

Garrett Ward Shelton, ed. - Encyclopedia of Political Thought