Holding One's Time in Thought: The Political Philosophy of WJ Stankiewicz

Evan Simpson is dean of Humanities at McMaster University and the editor
of Anti-foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations between
Hermeneutics and Analysis.

This book is primarily the record of a 1995 colloquium on the work of
political philosopher W.J. Stankiewicz, whose contribution to the
discipline, according to the editors, “needed to be assessed.” The
volume is, in fact, a collection of appreciations. Although a professor
for many years at the University of British Columbia, Stankiewicz is a
central European intellectual who, like the present Pope, defies easy
political categorization along the conservative/liberal/socialist
spectrum but whose comprehensive and passionately expressed worldview
attracts admirers. Closest among political theorists to Edmund Burke,
Stankiewicz prizes “great books,” “sovereignty,” and
“authority,” and excoriates “behavioralism,” “relativism,”
and “political correctness.” Unfortunately, little of this is
subjected to forms of critical analysis that would test these abstract
ideas to their possible advantage. For example, contributors discuss
Stankiewicz’s advocacy of a form of natural law over contemporary
doctrines of human rights, but their discussion usually proceeds through
large, questionable assertions, such as “Mill ... gave the individual
what was in effect an empty freedom,” and “liberalism represents the
eruption of relativism in Western political philosophy.” Claims of
this sweeping sort do little justice to complicated issues. Neither do
such broadsides as “To Mill, society is the creation of the self. To
Marx, the self is the creation of society.” Readers who know these
writers will hunger for a morsel of nuance.