Contrary to his usual portrayal as a disinterested aesthete, Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is characterised as an original social and political thinker in Richard Sigurdson's timely book Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought. Burckhardt's thinking on a number of ideas - including the relationship between the individual and the mass, the tension between the ideals of equality and human excellence, and the role of the intellectual in the modern state - is the subject of insightful analysis, thus providing a rare investigation into Burckhardt's culture-critique of...