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What is the subject-matter of political theory and how does it relate to other subject-matters, such as that of moral theory? What is the relation between political theory and political practice—between the kind of solution that a theory offers to the political problems and the kind of solution that is sought in practice through the operation of political institutions? What is the relation between scientific political theory and practical political arguments?

Human Nature and History, a monumental work in two volumes, is an attempt to analyze these relations. It is a work in meta-theory or the theory of political theory.

At the most general level, Cumming is concerned with the question of what is involved in the enterprise of political theory or political philosophy and how different conceptions of that enterprise have developed historically. More specifically, he is concerned with the format imposed on the historical development of political thought by Anglo-American liberalism, especially as represented by John Stuart Mill.

Since Cumming traces the development of political theory by reference to the relation between its subject-matter and other subject-matters, his study should be of interest to historians of thought and culture, as well as to political theorists and philosophers.

In this final volume of Robert Denoon Cumming's four-volume history of the phenomenological movement, Cumming examines the bearing of Heidegger's philosophy on his original commitment to Nazism and on his later inability to face up to the implication of that allegiance. Cumming continues his focus, as in previous volumes, on Heidegger's connection with other philosophers. Here, Cumming looks first at Heidegger's relation to Karl Jaspers, an old friend on whom Heidegger turned his back when Hitler consolidated power, and who discredited Heidegger in the denazification that followed World War II. The issues at stake are not merely personal, Cumming argues, but regard the philosophical relevance of the personal.

After the war Heidegger disavowed Sartre, a move related to Heidegger's renunciation of his association with the phenomenological movement at large, and one that illustrates the dynamics of the history Cumming himself has completed. Serving as convincing punctuation for this remarkable series, this book demonstrates the importance of the history of philosophy in coming to grips with the proclaimed end of philosophy.

"Philosophy as . . . a rigorous science . . . the dream is over," Edward Husserl once declared. Heidegger (Husserl's successor), Derrida, and Rorty have propounded versions of "the end of philosophy." Cumming argues that what would count as philosophy's coming to an end can only be determined with some attention to disruptions which have previously punctuated the history of philosophy. He arrives at categories for interpreting what is at issue in such disruptions by analyzing Heidegger's and Husserl's break with each other, Heidegger's break with Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty's break with Sartre.

In this analysis Cumming deals with how a philosophy can be vulgarized (as Heidegger's was by Nazism but in Heidegger's own view by Sartre), with problems of periodization, with how the history of philosophy can be disinguished as a philosophical discipline from intellectual history. Cumming also elaborates an analogy between a philosophical method and style.

Philosophers are committed to objective understanding, but the
history of philosophy demonstrates how frequently one philosopher
misunderstands another. The most notorious such breakdown in
communication in twentieth-century philosophy was between Husserl and
Heidegger. In the third volume of his history of the phenomenological
movement, Robert Denoon Cumming argues that their differences involve
differences in method; whereas Husserl follows a "method of
clarification," with which he eliminates ambiguities by relying on an
intentional analysis that isolates its objects, Heidegger rejects the
criterion of "clarity" and embraces ambiguities as exhibiting
overlapping relations.

Cumming also explores the differences between how
deconstruction—Heidegger's procedure for dealing with other
philosophers—is carried out when Heidegger interprets Husserl versus
when Derrida interprets Husserl. The comparison enables Cumming to
show how deconstruction is associated with Heidegger's arrival at the
end of philosophy, paving the way for the deconstructionist movement.

"Husserl had captured me, I saw everything in terms of the perspectives of his philosophy," wrote Sartre of his conversion to Husserl's phenomenology. In the present volume Cumming analyzes Sartre's transformation of Husserl's phenomenological method into a rudimentary dialectic. Cumming thus provides an introduction to phenomenology itself, and more generally to the ways in which debts to previous philosophies can be refurbished in later philosophies. He shows how phenomenology, which for Husserl was a theory of knowledge in which "we can always presume sincerity," becomes for Sartre a theory in which imagination, self-deception, and role playing are crucial.

Cumming also shows that conversion is not merely a personal predisposition of Sartre's—further manifest in his later conversions to Heidegger and to a version of Marxism. Conversion is also philosophical preoccupation, illustrated by the "conversion to the imaginary" whereby Sartre explains how he himself, as well as Genet and Flaubert, became writers. Finally, Cumming details how Husserl's phenomenological method contributed both to the shaping of Sartre's style as a literary writer and to his theory of style.