Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish--and European--Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary travel literature, Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtues. Central themes in Ferguson's theory of citizenship are conflict, play, political participation and military valor. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active citizenship in the modern state.

The Statesman is Plato's neglected political work, but it is crucial for an understanding of the development of his political thinking. It continues themes from the Republic, particularly the importance of knowledge as entitlement to rule. But there are also changes: Plato has altered his view of the moral psychology of the citizen, and revised his position on the role of law and institutions. This new translation makes accessible the dialogue to students of political thought and the introduction outlines the philosophical and historical backgrounds.

The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics contains all the essential political writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Novalis during the formative period of romantic thought (1797 to 1803). The early romantics had an ambition still relevant today: to find a middle path between conservatism and liberalism, between a community ethic and individual freedom. Frederick Beiser's edition comprises all kinds of texts, from essays to jottings from notebooks. All have been translated anew, many for the first time.

This is the first English translation of Guicciardini's Dialogue on the Government of Florence, written in the 1520s. Like Machiavelli, his more famous contemporary and friend, Guicciardini rejects classical republican arguments in the name of the new political realism and acknowledges the important role of patronage and graft in contemporary politics and the illegitimacy of nearly all forms of political power, arguing for the priority of state interest over private morality and religion.

This is the first English edition of a treatise that influenced French thinkers from its publication in 1610 until the end of the ancien regime. In his Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities, Charles Loyseau set out to harmonize with law his fellow citizens' values and behavior in the crucial sphere of possession and exercise of public power. The introduction to this edition sets this important text in the context of Loyseau's own political thesis and the intellectual milieu of those who administered early-modern France.

Stirner's The Ego and its Own (1844) is striking in both style and content, attacking Feuerbach, Moses Hess and others to sound the death-knell of Left Hegelianism. The work also constitutes an enduring critique of liberalism and socialism from the perspective of an extreme eccentric individualism. Stirner has latterly been portrayed variously as a precursor of Nietzsche, a forerunner of existentialism, an individualist anarchist, and as manifestly insane. This edition includes an Introduction placing Stirner in his historical context.

Fenelon's Telemachus ranks with Bossuet's Politics as the most important work of political theory of the French grand siecle, influencing Montesquieu and Rousseau in its attempt to combine monarchism with republican virtues. Telling the tale of Ulysses' son Telemachus' education by his tutor Mentor (the goddess Minerva in disguise), it shows him learning the qualities of patience, courage, modesty and simplicity, needed when he succeeds as King of Ithaca. It is a commentary on the bellicosity and luxuriousness of Louis XIV.

With a full chronology, general introduction, explanatory annotation, glossary and bibliography, this volume seeks to give students with no specialist knowledge access to both the practical and metaphysical aspects of Hegel's political thought. This collection gathers together for the first time in English translation Hegel's most important political writings, other than the Philosophy of Right, and provides insights into how Hegel's educational and religious views conflicted with the political values around which Prussian authorities organized their authoritarian regime.

The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it. Marshall Shatz's introduction to this edition traces Kropotkin's evolution as an anarchist, from his origins in the Russian aristocracy to his disillusionment with the Russian Revolution. The volume also includes a number of his shorter writings, including a hitherto untranslated chapter from his classic Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of...