Voltaire said, "Machiavelli taught Europe the art of war; it had long been practiced, without being known." For Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), war was war, and victory the supreme aim to which all other considerations must be subordinated. The Art of War is far from an anachronism--its pages outline fundamental questions that theorists of war continue to examine today, making it essential reading for any student of military history, strategy, or theory. Machiavelli believed The Art of War to be his most important work.

Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers--Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue--laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo...

In this thought-provoking study, Neal Wood challenges the conception of political theory as a lofty discipline remote from the world of real politics. Drawing on the examples of thinkers from Plato to those of the nineteenth century, he attempts to define political theory by examining the nature of the state and politics, by identifying the major characteristics that their theories share and by analyzing the conditions that have favoured their creation. Wood critically explores the two principle approaches to studying the work of past theorists - the philosophical and historical - and...