A history of political thought
Subtitle: from antiquity to the present
By: Bruce Haddock.
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780745640846; 9780745640853
Subjects: Political science -- History
Description: This book is a comprehensive introduction to the history of political thought, tracing the development of arguments and controversies from ancient Greece, through different forms of community, state and empire, to today's global concerns. Bruce Haddock highlights the bewildering variety of contexts that have framed political thinking, yet also displays structural features that have proved to be remarkably stable over time. An important theme in the book is the need to see political philosophy, even in its most abstract formulations, as a response to historically contingent circumstances, without limiting its relevance to those circumstances. The emphasis throughout is on political thinking as a response to hard choices. Major thinkers covered in this work include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Lenin, Schmitt, Nietzsche, Foucault, Oakeshott and Rawls. The book treats political philosophy and theory as a tentative engagement with a fractured and controversial past. Yet political thinking remains the exercise of a burden of a responsibility that is inescapable for us.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [268]-316) and index.