Textual Introduction to Social and Political Theory

This book offers a stimulating new approach to studying social and political theory. It combines specially selected extracts from the political classics with original and insightful essays offering a commentary upon them. The reader is drawn into a dialogue with the Western political tradition's principal thinkers, whose ideas provide a common currency in which to debate the problems facing modern societies. Each of the twelve chapters combines extracts from two (or in one case three) political philosophers on a key political concept with a commentary essay. Each chapter does more than just introduce the reader to the classics; it also explains, via the commentary essay, the key concepts of political debate, and the historical contexts which led the thinkers to their different understandings of the nature of society.Table of ContentSocrates and Lock on political obligation, Richard Bellamy; Aristotle and Aquinas on community and natural law, Timothy O'Hagan; Machiavelli, Milton and HObbes on liberty, Martin Hollis; Locke and Aristotle on property, John Zvesper; Rousseau and Wollstonecraft on sexual equality, Timothy O'Hagan; Kant and Hegel on the state and civil society, Howard Caygill; Burke and de Tocqueville on conservatism, John Greenaway; James Mill and Rousseau on democracy, John Street; Marx and Lenin on communism, David Houghton; Bakunin and Kropotkin on anarchism, Tony Kemp-Welch; J.S. Mill and Durkheim on individualism, Angus Ross; Weber and Michels on bureaucracy, Alan Scott.Biographical NoteRichard Bellamy is Professor of Government at the University of Essex