Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts, Paperback

Now greatly expanded in its third edition, Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts is ideal for survey courses in political philosophy. Offering unprecedented coverage from antiquity to the present, this historically organized collection presents the most significant works from nearly 2,500 years of political philosophy. The readings are substantial or complete texts, not fragments. An especially valuable feature of this volume is that the works of each author are introduced with an engaging essay by a leading contemporary authority.

Political Philosophy moves from classical thought (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero) through the medieval period (Augustine, Aquinas) to modern perspectives (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Hamilton and Madison, Burke, Bentham, Tocqueville). The book includes work from major nineteenth-century thinkers (Hegel, Marx and Engels, Mill, Nietzsche) and twentieth-century theorists (Arendt, Hayek, Berlin, Taylor, Rawls, Sandel, Nozick, Foucault, Habermas, Held, Nussbaum, Young, Appiah) and also presents a variety of notable documents and addresses, including The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, and speeches by Abraham Lincoln, John Dewey, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition to the new selections noted above in bold, the third edition also includes the complete text of Mill's On Liberty, an excerpt from Rawls's Political Liberalism, and expanded selections from Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and The Federalist Papers.

About the Author:

Steven M. Cahn is Professor of Philosophy at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author or editor of fifty books. Most recently, he wrote From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor (2008) and coauthored Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work (2013). Dr. Cahn is the editor of Exploring Philosophy, Fifth Edition (2014) and Exploring Ethics, Third Edition (2013), and the coeditor of Ethics, Fifth Edition (2011), all published by Oxford University Press.