European political thought since 1945

Abstract:

This work delivers a fresh insight into the political thought which has been the slow but enduring (and perhaps unconscious) motivator for the reconstruction of Europe and the deconstruction of the Soviet bloc.

The book is organised over seven chapters. Chapter one sets the scene, exploring the four core items of the post war agenda - limitations on the power of the state, creation of a fairer society, establishment of a more pluralist form of democracy, and the role of the nation-state in a world of sub-national and supra-national forms of citizenship. Chapter two concentrates upon British political thought and the extent to which the traditional constitutional system, simply dusted down with a frill or two added, might survive in a post colonial world and a Britain stripped of Empire. Chapter three turns to France, looking at the French search for a new accommodation with liberal democracy since 1945. The German experience is the subject of chapter four which explores the interaction of nationalism, democracy and unification in post war German political thought, the response of the German people to the Allied Powers’ construct of a divided Germany and the aspirations for a unified Germany free to take its place in the building of a new Europe. Chapter five addresses the Italian situation and a nation slow to shake off the clothes of its political past, riddled with mistrust and the corrupt power trading of the Italian elite unable to embrace the new democracy of a pluralist society responsive to individual rights. Chapter six addresses the progress of political thought in East-Central Europe, dominated as it was by Nazism only to be subjected to Soviet imperial rule, and questions whether or not there is the prospect of real nationhood with capacity for diversity and tolerances beyond ethnic boundaries. Chapter seven offers the conclusions drawn from earlier chapters under the thought provoking title “Towards a New Post-Democratic Agenda” and considers the prospect of a new supra-national European political order.

The work will interest scholars and students of politics, European studies or anyone interested in political thought in Europe from 1945 to the present.

Noël O’Sullivan is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Hull.