This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practising politicians and would-be revolutionaries have given to one question:how should human beings best govern themselves? That question raises innumerable others: can we manage our own affairs at all? Should we even try? Many people in the past have thought that only some individuals were either able or entitled to practise self-government: Greeks, but not Persians; men, but not women; the better-off minority...

Jack Quinlan, an American writer, travels to a small village in the remote western part of Ireland to research a book on the Irish Famine. The quiet, picturesque village seems just the place to spend a few months writing, but beneath its placid exterior lurk dark secrets. Why do the locals behave so strangely? What is Father Henning, the enigmatic parish priest, hiding? And what is the meaning of the strange ritual Jack observes in the cemetery? The search for answers will lead him to the ...

An essential, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the life and works of Machiavelli.In On Machiavelli: The Search for Glory, Alan Ryan illuminates the political and philosophical complexities of the often-reviled godfather of realpolitik. Thought by some to be the founder of Italian nationalism, regarded by others to be a reviver of the Roman Republic as a model for the modern Western world, Machiavelli remains a contentious figure. Often outraging popu...

An essential, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the life and works of Aristotle.In On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy, Alan Ryan examines Plato's most famous student and sharpest critic, whose writing has helped shape over two millennia of Western philosophy, science, and religion. The first thinker to posit that a society should be ruled by laws and not men, Aristotle was born in Stagira, Macedon, in 384 BCE. He would go on to join Plato's...

No philosopher speaks more immediately to the excesses of our twenty-first-century world and the limits of human reason than Augustine.It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of Augustine—the once-hedonistic pagan turned ascetic theologian and defender of the early Christian Church—over all the subsequent history of Europe. Augustine ’s political philosophy is pregnant with arguments that racked not only Christian Europe but also much of the moder...

The Bible, since its first publication circa 14511455, remains the best-selling book of all time at over six-billion books sold worldwide. Its mandateto teach us what is true, to make us realize what is wrong in our lives, to straighten us out and help us do what is right, and to fully equip us to do good to everyone (2 Timothy 3:1517 TLB)is alive and well. The Bible remains popular because it provides answers to many of lifes most pressing questionsincluding queries related to leadership,...

One of the most important nineteenth-century schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of an action rests in how well it promotes the welfare of those affected by it, aiming for 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was the movement's founder, as much a social reformer as a philosopher. His greatest interpreter, John Stuart Mill (1806-73), set out to humanize Bentham's pragmatic Utilitarianism by balancing the cl...

One of the world's leading political thinkers explores the history, nature, and prospects of the liberal traditionThe Making of Modern Liberalism is a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the origins and nature of liberalism from the Enlightenment through its triumphs and setbacks in the twentieth century and beyond. The book is the fruit of the more than four decades during which Alan Ryan, one of the world's leading political thinkers, reflected on the p...

A guiding light to America’s Founding Fathers, Hobbes created the first truly modern political philosophy.In Leviathan, one of the greatest works of political philosophy of all time, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes created the idea of a “social contract” and set out to explicate a doctrine for the foundation of states and legitimate forms of government. In On Hobbes, Alan Ryan explains how Hobbes created the secular conception of the state and p...

Isaiah Berlin was born a century ago. One of the most celebrated British thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a tireless champion of freedom and diversity against control and conformity. His generous, open vision of life is displayed with special immediacy in his brilliant pen-portraits of contemporaries, Personal Impressions, in which he sees the point of radically differing personalities, enters into their distinctive outlooks, and describes his encounters with them, in arrestingly ...

An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, first published in 1865, with a second edition in the same year, and third and fourth editions in 1867 and 1872, has long been out of print. The Examination was, for his contemporaries, a most significant and popular work, presenting an extended treatment of some matters central to empiricism that found little space in Mill's Logic, the best known being his treatment of matter and mind from a psychological view...

Tocqueville’s gifts as an observer and commentator on American life and democracy are brought to vivid life in this splendid volume.In On Tocqueville, Alan Ryan brilliantly illuminates the observations of the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, who first journeyed to the United States in 1831 and went on to catalog the unique features of the American social contract in his two-volume masterpiece, Democracy in America. Often thought of as the...