Product Description: Book by Harvard, Joseph

Product Description: The Enlightenment has turned different faces to those who have sought to demonstrate its significance for contemporary politics and philosophy. Some would call it the seedbed of all that is best in modern Western civilization: human rights, toleration, popular sovereignty, and the idea of progress...read more

This volume provides an unequaled introduction to the thought of chief contributors to the Western tradition of political philosophy from classical Greek antiquity to the twentieth century. Written by specialists on the various philosophers, this third edition has been expanded significantly to include both new and revised essays.

Product Description: The ancient Greeks invented democracy. They also invented political theory. This book seeks to show that these were not unrelated achievements. The development of political theory accompanied the growth of democracy at Athens in the fifth century BC...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A comprehensive look at Zen, one of the most popular forms of Buddhism for Western minds. Chapters include the birth of Zen, the nature of Zen, the fruits of Zen, Zen technique, satori (enlightenment), Zen in English literature, & Zen for the West...read more

Capitalism was born in England, yet the dominant Western conceptions of modernity have come from elsewhere, notably from France, the historical model of “bourgeois” society. In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a “modern” state and political culture in Continental Europe, signalled the persistence of precapitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a “modern” state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.Weaving together economic and political history with the history of ideas, Wood ranges across a broad spectrum of current debates, from the “Nairn–Anderson theses” to the contribution of J.C.D. Clark and Alan Macfarlane, and over a wide variety of topics: the development of British capitalism and French absolutism; the state, the nation and their symbolic representations; revolution and tradition; the cultural patterns of English speech, urbanism, ruralism and the landscape garden; ideas of sovereignty, democracy, property and progress.This book will be as interesting and provocative to observers of contemporary capitalism as to historians of early modern Europe or Western political thought.

The main aim of this study is to re-examine both the traditional theories of democracy in the West a....

With nearly 100 readings and 24 pages of visual arguments, Conversations provides the reader with an entry point to an extraordinary variety of authors, genres, voices, and viewpoints on important contemporary civic issues.

Bruce Haddock's lucid and original textbook combines historical and theoretical analysis, setting political thought in the context of the emerging institutional, cultural and economic framework of the modern world. From the colossal impact of the French and American revolutions, through reaction and constitutional consolidation, the book traces the contrasting criteria invoked to justify particular forms of political order from 1789 to the present day. Its chapters are organized around key themes such as liberty, welfare, the nation-state and totalitarianism, focusing on the response of theorists to fundamental ideological and political controversies. Major thinkers covered include Kant, Burke, Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, Mazzini, Lenin, Schmitt, Hayek, Oakeshott and Rawls. The book also confronts challenging questions about the status of moral and political principles. Cultural and moral controversy is characteristic of our everyday experience. In recent decades, however, the foundations of political and ethical theory have been widely questioned. Haddock highlights the emergence of a dilemma that faces all citizens: how we make judgements of value from embedded positions in social and cultural communities. A History of Political Thought: 1789 to the Present will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, history and philosophy.

Civil Religion offers philosophical commentaries on more than twenty thinkers stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The book examines four important traditions within the history of modern political philosophy and delves into how each of them addresses the problem of religion. Two of these traditions pursue projects of domesticating religion. The civil religion tradition, principally defined by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, seeks to domesticate religion by putting it solidly in the service of politics. The liberal tradition pursues an alternative strategy of domestication by seeking to put as much distance as possible between religion and politics. Modern theocracy is a militant reaction against liberalism, and it reverses the relationship of subordination asserted by civil religion: it puts politics directly in the service of religion. Finally, a fourth tradition is defined by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Aspects of their thought are not just modern, but hyper-modern, yet they manifest an often-hysterical reaction against liberalism that is fundamentally shared with the theocratic tradition. Together, these four traditions compose a vital dialogue that carries us to the heart of political philosophy itself.

Product Description: This is a history of political ideologies during the period famously described by Eric Hobsbawn as ‘The Age of Extremes’ - from the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union.Ideologies in the Age of Extremes introduces the key ideologies of the age; liberalism, conservatism, communism and fascism...read more

Product Description: This brief narrative survey of political thought over the past two millennia explores key ideas that have shaped Western political traditions. Beginning with the Ancient Greeks' classical emphasis on politics as an independent sphere of activity, the book goes on to consider the medieval and early modern Christian views of politics and its central role in providing spiritual leadership...read more

Product Description: As Mary Ann Glendon writes in this fascinating new book, the relationship between politics and the academy has been fraught with tension and regret-and the occasional brilliant success-since Plato himself.In The Forum and the Tower, Glendon examines thinkers who have collaborated with leaders, from ancient Syracuse to the modern White House, in a series of brisk portraits that explore the meeting of theory and reality...read more

Product Description: Volumes of influence explores the work of a number of important books and key writers within the academic disciplines of politics and international relations. It revisits and re-evaluates some of the landmark or classic books in politics and international relations, and assesses the contribution of some of the most influential writers who have played a significant role in the development of these disciplines, who defined their subjects, set agendas and inspired...read more

Product Description: What does the institution of punishment look like in an ideal political system? Is punishment merely an exercise of violence of the strong against the weak? And what does the phenomenon of revealed religion add to the understanding of punishment? These are some of the many questions contemplated in The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought, which provides a provocative exploration of the contributions of nine major thinkers and traditions regarding the question of punitive justice...read more