Essays: Moral, Political and Literary
10 best books like Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (David Hume): Politics, The Republic, A Mercy, The Wall, Discourse on Method, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Critique of Pure Reason, A Letter Concerning Toleration, Political Writings (Texts in the History of Political Thought), Elements of the Philosophy of Right
| Author | Aristotle |
| ISBN | 0486414248 |
What is the relationship of the individual to the state? What is the ideal state, and how can it bring about the most desirable life for its citizens? What sort of education should it provide? What is the purpose of amassing wealth? These are some of the questions Aristotle attempts to answer in one of the...
| Author | Plato |
| ISBN | 0140449140 |
Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, this classic text is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. During the conversation, other questions are raised: what is goodness?; what is reality?; and what is knowledge?...
| Author | Toni Morrison |
| ISBN | 0307264238 |
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic...
'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws...
| Author | René Descartes |
| ISBN | 0872204227 |
By far the most widely used translation in North American college classrooms, Donald A. Cress's translation from the French of the Adam and Tannery critical edition is prized for its accuracy, elegance, and economy. The translation featured in the Third Edition has been thoroughly revised from the...
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
| Author | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| ISBN | 0486434141 |
If humans are benevolent by nature, how do societies become corrupt? And how do governments founded upon the defense of individual rights degenerate into tyranny? These are the questions addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a strikingly original inquiry...
| Author | Immanuel Kant |
| ISBN | 0521657296 |
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: J. F. Hartknoch, 1781), 856 pp. 2nd (B) ed: 1787. [A-edition (Ak. 4:5-252); B-edition (Ak. 3:2-552)]. “Critique of Pure Reason.” Translated by Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan 1929). Translated by Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett 1996). Translated by Paul...
Having read the text of the New Testament a fair number of times, I can see nothing that yields the conclusion that the purpose of Christianity is building theocratic nation states. A straightforward reading indicates Christianity occupies a subservient position to civil government while allowing...
| Author | Immanuel Kant |
| ISBN | 0521398371 |
The original edition of Kant: Political Writings was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this new, expanded edition two important texts illustrating Kant's view of history are included for the first...
| Author | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
| ISBN | 0521348889 |
This book is a translation of a classic work of modern social and political thought, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel's last major published work, is an attempt to systematize ethical theory, natural right, the philosophy of law, political theory and the sociology of the modern state into...
| Author | Michael Oakeshott |
| ISBN | 0865970955 |
Rationalism in Politics,
first published in 1962, has established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of "reason" in rationalist politics.
Oakeshott criticizes...
| Author | Isaiah Berlin |
| ISBN | 0691090998 |
Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were broadcast by the BBC in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years later. They comprise one of Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and on the history...
| Author | Henry Sidgwick |
| ISBN | 0915145286 |
This Hackett edition, first published in 1981, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the seventh (1907) edition as published by Macmillan and Company, Limited.
From the forward by John Rawls:
In the utilitarian tradition Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) has an important...
| Author | John Leslie Mackie |
| ISBN | 0140135588 |
Recently, I decided to delve into meta-ethics, more specifically twentieth century-meta-ethics. With the fear of over-generalizing, up to the twentieth century ethics was pretty straightforward. There were: ethics rooted in metaphysics (Christianity, Kant, Spinoza, etc.); ethics rooted...
| Author | Marcus Tullius Cicero |
| ISBN | 0521348358 |
De Officiis (On Duties) is Cicero's last theoretical work and contains his analysis, in a Greek theoretical framework, of the political and ethical values of the Roman governing class in the late Republic. It has often been treated merely as a key to the Greek philosophical works that Cicero used, but...
That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.
Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain –...
Natural Right and History
| Author | Leo Strauss |
| ISBN | 0226776948 |
In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned...
