"Did X read Y?" is a question we often can't answer. Sometimes we get
lucky: we pull
his borrowing record off the library mainframe, we prove that it's his
laundry-list
among the marginalia of a ms, we identify [near-]direct quotations, but
this sort of
thing is often unusual. If you don't know it already, look at Brian
Tierney,
_Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650_
(Cambridge:
1988) -- and there are others. As more modern examples, Juergen Habermas
and Eduard
Said can often be 'Lockean' (and sometimes positively Stubbsly), but did
they read
Locke? ... Muratori? ... or did they just benefit from a tradition that
Locke and
Muratori had grabbed by the neck and given a bit of a seeing-to? I
dunno. An
interesting exercise would be to write to the rightly esteemed Mr Said
and ask him to
list everything he's ever read. But he wouldn't thank you. And you can't
ask
Habermas, because he's gone to his Reward. And a very very few people
ARE truly
original, for all that they can 'echo' previous work. Good luck!
Yrs. & oblidg.
Angus Graham, Al-Khod, Musqat
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