Western Political Thought

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Plato. 3. Aristotle. 4. Saint Augustine. 5. Saint Thomas Aquinas. 6. Niccolo Machiavelli. 7. Thomas Hobbes. 8. John Locke. 9. Jean Jacques Rousseau. 10. Edmund Burke. 11. Immanual Kant. 12. John Stuart Mill. 13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 14. Karl Marx. Bibliography. Index.

"Political philosophy is the study of the fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, property, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown. Western political thought has been dominated, since the beginning, with an interest in the procedures by which political power is applied.

This book is an introduction to western political thoughts, spanning from the ancient to the modern times. It aims to give students the opportunity to study a range of thinkers who are considered to be key in the \'canon\' of western political thought. Written simply and directly, it presents the basic ideas and dilemmas of western political thought through an in-depth analysis of a limited number of major thinkers--from Plato to Karl Marx. It views the thinkers in historical context and examines them in terms of the changing relationships of ethics and politics in western political thought." (jacket)