Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Vasileios Syros : Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought . (Toronto : University of Toronto Press , 2012. Pp. x, 305.)
Book Reviews: FORERUNNER OF MODERNITY
In 2007 Vasileios Syros, a young scholar with exceptionally broad interests in the field of political theory and its history, published Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua, an intervention, firmly on the negative side, in the debate (engaged in fitfully by specialists over the last few decades) over whether Marsilius can rightly be classed as an "Aristotelian." The present volume might be described as a companion to that one or, better, since it openly incorporates ideas and material from about seventy-five percent of it, as an Englishing and expansion of it. Where Rezeption was more single-minded in its focus on Marsilius's divergences from the Politics of Aristotle, Syros's new book tries to weave a much more variegated tapestry of sources and influences for the Paduan thinker. These include borrowings from other classical traditions--Platonic, Stoic, Ciceronian--and, strikingly, from protohumanist and non-Western ones as well. But I should be careful about the use of terms like "sources" and "influences" here, which suggest that Syros is a rather traditional historian of political ideas, albeit one with a knack for finding long-hidden intellectual linkages. The truth is that Syros tries, as much if not more, to be a comparative political theorist.
Comparative political theory is still a relatively new sort of academic inquiry, certainly in medieval studies. But in the two decades or so since Fred Dallmayr, in the pages of this journal (vol. 59, p. 421), could rightly describe the entire field as "nonexistent or at most fledgling and embryonic," the notion of "dialogue" and of a dialogue specifically aimed at a Gadamerian Horizontverschmelzung has become a central motivation for the field. Throughout Syros's book there is an unspoken tension between history...