PROFESSOR SERVES AS VISITING SCHOLAR AT UCLA

A Southeast Missouri State University assistant professor and political theorist in the political science department spent the summer at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting scholar.

While there, he studied the political, philosophical works of the Levellers and Thomas Hobbes.

Under a grant provided by Southeast Missouri State University's Grants and Research Funding Committee, Mitchel Gerber spent more than a month engaged in research at the UCLA University Research Library and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

His research project was titled "The Political Theory of Republicanism and the Concept of the Civic Virtue in the Works of the Levellers and Thomas Hobbes."

The Levellers were members of an English party that arose in the army of the Long Parliament around 1647.

Hobbes was an English political philosopher who taught that a strong government, especially an absolute monarchy, is needed to control clashing individual interests.

Gerber previously has researched this area in several major research libraries including the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

As part of this research, Gerber worked with many of the scarce works, political tracts, broadsides and treatises of the Levellers and Hobbes. He also worked with documents from their critics.

Focus of his research was on the critical, philosophical and historical analysis of the significance of the normative concepts of civic virtue, political leadership accountability, civic education, community and public good in the political, philosophical works of the Levellers and Hobbes.

Gerber's goal was to confirm, through historical evidence and conceptual analysis of sources, that Hobbes and the Levellers understood such normative, fundamental, political principles.

Gerber also studied the major variations among the Leveller political theorists in their interpretative analyses of public interest, civic virtue, natural law and political community.

In conjunction with the Bicentennial celebration of the ratification of the American Bill of Rights, Gerber also studied the political, philosophical connections and impact of Leveller political theory on early American political philosophy.

In addition, as a visiting scholar in UCLA's political science department, Gerber worked with several other scholars in political science, philosophy and history.

His article, "Leveller Political Theory and the Concepts of Community and Public Good," has been accepted for publication in the spring 1992 edition of National Social Science Journal.

Gerber plans to submit several additional journal articles based on his summer research.