San Antonio College Library

Thomas Paine stands out in the literature and history of the eighteenth century as one of the luminaries of both the American and the French revolutions. He served in America as a soldier, diplomat and journalist; in France, as a legislator and constitution-maker; then became in both countries, as well as in his native England, a symbol of the rights of man and the struggle for democracy. In a third great revolution -- that in the realm of theology...

Presents the text of four essays by nineteenth-century English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, and includes textual and explanatory notes, chronology, and introduction.

A collection of twenty-one essays written over Shklar's forty-year career as a professor at Harvard University.

Niccolo Machiavelli taught that political leaders must be prepared to do evil that good may come of it, and his name has been a byword ever since for duplicity and immorality. Is his sinister reputation deserved? In answering this question Quentin Skinner focuses on three major works, The Prince, the Discourses, and The History of Florence, and distills from them an introduction to Machiavelli of exemplary clarity.-publisher description.

"When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the...

This brilliant critique of the literature on modernity challenges the conventional approach in two fundamental ways. First, it argues that the lineage of the modern is much less ancient and glorious than is usually suggested. Modernity is an upstart rather than the scion of an old and celebrated line. It fabricated a grand genealogy for itself, whereas in fact its ancestry lies buried in the dirt. This leads to the second argument, namely, that modernity...

This volume investigates the political philosophies of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, Rawls and Marx and reveals the scope and limits of the philosophical tradition they helped to forge. A cohesive narrative about modern political philosophy emerges thathelps create an accessible introduction.

Adam Smith was a philosopher before he ever wrote about economics, yet until now there has never been a philosophical commentary on the Wealth of Nations. Samuel Fleischacker suggests that Smith's vastly influential treatise on economics can be better understood if placed in the light of his epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. He lays out the relevance of these aspects of Smith's thought to specific themes in the Wealth of Nations,...