James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a longterm process of social change that led to the decay of the old political order. Professor Pocock's lucid introduction emphasizes Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of principal events...

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was arguably the most important English theorist to focus on the issue of political liberty during the English Enlightenment. His concept of freedom is of crucial importance to two of the major issues of his day: the right of dissenters to religious toleration, and the right of the American colonists to self-government. Priestley's writings lack a modern edition and this new collection will be the first to render accessible his Essay on First Principles, The Present State of Liberty and the Letter of Advice. An introduction and notes, and guides to further reading...

The writings of the High Church Tory pamphleteer Mary Astell (1666-1731) are a remarkable contribution to the constitutional debates that ushered in the modern democratic state. An interlocutor with Swift and Defoe, Astell was perhaps the first systematic critic of Locke's writings. Astell's political pamphlets Reflections upon Marriage, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, and An Impartial Enquiry into the Origins of Rebellion have never been reprinted in their entirety. This new edition makes accessible the major works of an important political theorist.

This edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes works by more than thirty authors, including the sophists, poets, tragedians, historians, medical writers and presocratic philosophers. Besides political theory, ancient political thought includes early sociology, anthropology, ethics and rhetoric, and the wide range of issues discussed includes the origin of human society, the origin of law, the nature of justice, the forms of good government, and the distribution of power among genders and social classes.

Mary Wollstonecraft is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections on men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times that she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). This fully annotated edition brings these two works together.

This edition of Voltaire's political writings presents a varied selection of his most interesting and controversial texts, many of which have not previously been translated into English. Their themes include the nature and legitimacy of political power, law and the social order, and the growing disorder in the French economy, and in addition they touch on specific issues such as the Seven Years' War and relations with Frederick II, and the sensational trials of Jean Calas, Sirver and the Chevalier De La Barre.

This book presents Spencer's classic attempt to expose the flaws in socialism and to assert political individualism as the best way to guarantee social progress. It will be of interest to both undergraduates and specialists in politics, political theory, social policy, sociology and history.

This is the first complete modern edition of the political works of Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), one of the most acute observers of the European political order of his time and an important forerunner of the Scottish Enlightenment. Famous for his opposition to the Union with England in 1707, he viewed the problems of his own country in the light of a much broader knowledge of European affairs. His writings illustrate the long influence of Machiavelli on European political thought, and illuminates the major themes of the Enlightenment.

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.

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.