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Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, by Bart Schultz; pp. xx + 858. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £40.00, $48.00.
The early-twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad declared Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874), "on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has ever been written" (Five Types of Ethical Theory 143). Writing in 1930, Broad was no doubt conscious of a need to recover Sidgwick's reputation from the depredations of the then-current avant-garde. He was also concerned to remake the case for the central importance of moral philosophy for a generation that seemed to have grown tired of the subject. But Broad was fighting a rearguard battle; it was not until the last quarter of the twentieth century-primarily under the impact of the Harvard moral and political philosopher John Rawls-that Sidgwick and moral philosophy began to make a comeback. Probably the most distinguished expression of that new interest was J. B. Schneewind's fine study of 1977, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, which uses Sidgwick's Methods as, among other things, a way into portraying one of the principal philosophical preoccupations of an era. Now, a generation later, comes an even more extensive study by a scholar who, while yielding to none in his admiration for Schneewind's work, has carried the discussion well beyond its limits. So thorough and so penetrating is Bart Schultz's "intellectual biography" of this most eminent of Victorian philosophers that it seems appropriate to paraphrase Broad and say that it is, "on the whole," the best book on Sidgwick that has yet been written. It is certainly the most comprehensive.
To say that Schultz has produced the most comprehensive study of Sidgwick is to mean essentially two things. First, as intellectual history and philosophical analysis, it moves us beyond the almost exclusive focus on the magnum opus (Methods) and the question of ethics to consider fully Sidgwick's very important work in "social philosophy." (I use the term here to include economic, political, and, in a broad sense, cultural theory.) But by comprehensive, one means as well that Schultz tells us more about the biography, the intimate personality of his subject, than has any previous commentator.
To begin with the social philosophy: perhaps...