Book description
Modern liberalism begins in the forgetting of the English Revolution.
Anatomy of Failure
seeks to right that wrong by exploring the concept of political action,
playing its history against its philosophy.
The 1640s are a period of institutional failure and political disaster:
the country plunges into civil war, every agent is naked. Established
procedures are thrown aside and the very grounds for action are fiercely
debated and recast. Five queries emerge in the experience of the New
Model Army, five queries that outline an anatomy of failure, isolating
the points at which actors disagree, conflict flares up, and alliances
dissolve: Who can act? On what grounds? Who is right about what is to be
done? Why do we succeed or fail? If you and I split, were we ever
united, and to what end? The application of these questions to the
Leveller-agitator writings, and then to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke's
philosophies, generates models of political action
. No mere philosophical abstractions, the Hobbesian and Lockean models
of sovereign
and contractual
action have dominated the very practice of politics for centuries.
Today it is time to recuperate the Leveller-agitator model of joint
action, a model unique in its adequacy to the threat of failure and in
its vocation for building the common-wealth.
Anatomy of Failure
is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates taking
courses in Contemporary Political Philosophy, Continental Philosophy,
Modern European Philosophy, Contemporary French Philosophy, Critical
Theory and Radical Political Thought. Staged with theatrical flair,
Oliver Feltham s new book about the relation between principled ideals
and political realities avoids the twin perils of angelic critique or
servile apology , and finds in the fragile but revolutionary alliance of
the Levellers and the New Model Army some answers to perennial questions
about the relation between right and might. Oliver Feltham is
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Paris,
France.
