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82 Pol. Sci. Q. 1 (1967)

handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry82 and id is 1 raw text is: Thomas Hobbes and Contemporary Political Theory* GEORGE E. G. CATLIN London, England Many of us were brought up in academic schools, where the examination system assumed that we would verbally acquaint ourselves with gobbets of the so-called Classics of Political Theory. The writings of Hobbes, and especially his Leviathan, provided some of these gobbets of wisdom. I should be the first to emphasize the importance, for the physician, of having heard of the work of Galen. Elsewhere I have emphasized the importance, in political philosophy, of appreciating the conti- nuity in our civilization of that norm of values which can be assessed from the grand tradition in culture, to which a Plato, an Erasmus, a Goethe did so much to contribute-although Hobbes himself, in it, was almost certainly a heretic. By a heretic I mean an idiosyncratic, whose philosophical proposals, on the whole, subse- quent generations have conspired to reject. However, I should deplore a situation in which the physician regarded it as his first task not to explore the potentialities of the sciences of physiology and medicine, but to concentrate upon these great books and sacred classics of the long distant past. Precisely the same remark applies to political theorists who, with mis- directed scholarship, not only occupy their whole time in writing * This paper was read before the American Political Science Association, New York City, Sept. 8, 1966. Volume LXXXII March 1967 Number 1 1

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