G. H. Sabine popularly known as Sabine was professor of philosophy, dean of the Graduate School and vice president of Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He is best known for his authoritative work A History of Political Theory

A History of Political Theory

A History of Political Theory is a book that traces the history of political thought from ancient Greeks to Modern Nazism and Fascism. It was authored by Professor George Holland Sabine, philosopher and vice president of Cornell University....

 which traces the growth of political thought from the times of Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 to the modern day Fascism and Nazism.

Life

He was a student at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. In later years of is life he also participated in the American Political Science Association. His correspondence with Harold Laski

Harold Laski

Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950....

 and Frank Thilly is well-known.

Works

• "A History of Political Theory
  A History of Political Theory
  A History of Political Theory is a book that traces the history of political thought from ancient Greeks to Modern Nazism and Fascism. It was authored by Professor George Holland Sabine, philosopher and vice president of Cornell University....
  
  " - first published on April 10, 1937
• "What is Political Theory?" reprint from the Journal of Politics, Feb. 1939
• "Radical Empiricism as a Logical Method" reprint from Philosophical Review, Nov. 1905
• "Professor Bosanquet's Logic and the Concrete Universal" reprint from PR, Sept. 1912
• "The Concept of the State as Power" reprint from PR, July 1920
• "Hume's Contribution to the Historical Method" reprint from PR, Jan. 1906
• "Bosanquet's Theory of the Real Will" reprint from PR, Nov. 1923 (2 copies)
• "Descriptive and Normative Sciences" reprint from PR, July 1912
• "Philosophical and Scientific Specialization" reprint from PR, Jan. 1917
• "The Concreteness of Thought" reprint from PR, Mar. 1907
• "The Pragmatic Approach to Political Science" reprint from American Political Science Review, Nov. 1930
• "Political Science and the Juristic Point of View" reprint from APSR, Aug. 1928
• "The Material of Thought" reprint from PR, May 1907
• "Henry Adams and the Writing of History" reprint from the University of California Chronicle, Jan. 1924

Famous Quotes

• Modern States are relatively so large, so remote, so impersonal, that they can not fill the place in the modern life that the city-state filled in the life of a Greek.
• So firmly was Plato convinced of the pernicious effects of wealth upon government that he saw no way to abolish the evil except by abolishing the wealth itself, so far as the soldiers and rulers are concerned.
• The passionless authority of law does not take the place of magistrate, but it gives to the magistrate's authority a moral quality which it could not otherwise have.
• The growing stock of social intelligence is embedded in law and custom.
• No state can be just, since the advent of Christianity, unless it is also Christian, and a government considered apart from its relation to the church is would be devoid of justice.
• The Pope claimed a power of revision over all the other form of authority, whether ecclesiastical or secular.
• A council which itself was a prey to every form of national jealousy was ill qualified to attack the stupendous mass of vested interest that made up ecclesiastical patronage.
• According to Marsilio, religion is a social phenomenon; it uses material agencies and produces social consequences.
• The structure of Thomas' system is built on reason and faith; but he never doubted that it was one structure.
• Every important reform of English law can be traced to the influence of Bentham's ideas.
• The greatest happiness principle allows an skillful legislature to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law.
• Great men are instruments of the impersonal forces that make history; they see a little and direct a little , but in the end they bow before the inherent logic of events.
• Through his idealization of the nation state Hegel became a source for conservative nationalism, culmination in Fascism.
• Freedom means an actual possibility, in view of existing circumstances, of developing human capacities, a genuinely increased power on the part of an individual to share in the goods which the society has produced and an enlarged ability to contribute to the common good.
• The history of human civilization is, according to Hegel, is a succession of national cultures in which each nation, brings its peculiar and timely contribution to the whole human achievement.
• Human calculation and human interests may be factors in producing the necessity, yet the necessity predetermines the calculation and the direction that the interest must take.
• Lenin made Marxism a creed for a fighting organization of professional revolutionaries.
• Imperialism convinces an international proletariat that its interests can be served only by an international social revolution.
• According to Lenin there can be no middle ground between materialism and idealism.
• Dialectical materialism can set the mathematician right about Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry and can instruct the physicists about the correct relations between matter and electricity.
• Indeed, if piety toward the master permitted, Leninism might have claimed to have stood Marxism on its head, as Marx claimed to have stood the Hegelian dialectic on its feet.
• Lenin's formula remained the formula of Marx; the meaning of Leninism departed very widely from the meaning of Marxism.
• The philosophy of Fascism is fundamentally irrational, offering a myth created by intuition or by instinct and made true by the very act of believing it.
• Bodin's Republic was intended to supply the principles order and unity upon which any well-ordered state must rest.
• Bodin's philosophy ceases to be medieval without becoming modern.
• Law is at once the will of the sovereign and an expression of eternal justice; yet the two may be in conflict.
• Good is what conduces to self-preservation and evil what has an opposite effect.
• Hobbes is probably the greatest writer on political philosophy that English speaking peoples have produced.
• Life, liberty and estate of one person can be limited only to make effective the equally valid claims of another person to the same right.
• Without being himself a nationalist, Rousseau helped to recast the ancient ideal of citizenship in a form such that the national sentiment could appropriate it.