ABSTRACT
I hope it does not seem too presumptuous of me, as a foreigner, to speak of analytic thought to a British audience. In fact, the main representatives of analytic thought are British, and their production relating to the theory of politics and of law, although not very abundant so far, has already been examined in some comprehensive studies in English-speaking countries, such as that of Professor Herbert L. Hart in the American Journal of Comparative Law in 1953 (relating only to the theory of law), and one more directly concerned with politics, brilliantly written by my friend professor Rees in the review Il Politico in 1956. In the same year a miscellany of essays on politics and on law was edited by Peter Lasslett in Oxford, with the title Philosophy, Politics and Society. The contributors, all British, had acquired in the meanwhile some renown with special essays devoted to the theory of politics and of law: T.D. Weldon, Glanville Williams, and Margaret MacDonald (who had also developed an important activity in order to circulate the ideas of analytic philosophy, both as editor of the review Analysis, and of a miscellaneous book entitled Philosophy and Analysis, which appeared in 1954). If I were to designate in one term the general tendency of the so-called analytic school, I could not find any better word than an old one that traces back to the Middle Ages, “nominalism.” Of course I do not intend to suggest that these contemporary authors have resuscitated the medieval quarrel about the universalia or offered some new interpretation of that famous passage of Porphyry that gave rise to the quarrel in the Latin translation of Boetius. Nor do I mean that these authors present to us now a modernized version of the doctrines of Ockham. The term “nominalism” however, seems to me suitable enough to render the common tendency of all these authors, and, I would say, the spirit in which their research is performed: a spirit that circulated for centuries in British philosophical thought, so that “nominalism” is just the term
