On Politics History Political Thought Herodotus to Present

Description:

Book is in Used-Good condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact. Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes. May show signs of minor shelf wear and contain limited notes and highlighting. Seller Inventory # 0713993642-2-4

About this title:

• 4.2
  578 ratings by Goodreads

Synopsis: This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practicing 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 practice self-government, greeks, but not persians men, but not women; the better-off minority, but not the poor majority others have thought that few of us have any desire to govern ourselves and that government is inevitably a matter of a competent elite managing an acquiescent mass then, what do we mean by freedom today and is it the same freedom that people enjoyed or strove for, in the past almost every modern government claims to be democratic but is democracy really the best way of organizing our political life for almost two thousand years, educated opinion said not today, educated opinion says yes in the modern west, do we actually live in democracies they certainly do not resemble what the athenians fought and died to preserve it seems that there may be less agreement than we might think about how human beings can best govern themselves in this extraordinary book, more that thirty years in the making, alan ryan engages with the great thinkers of the past to explain their ideas with a lucidity which makes the book compelling reading while acknowledging how much separates us from our intellectual forebears, he reminds us how often the ideas of long dead or distant thinkers are more alive, and speak to us more vividly and immediately, than those of our contemporaries at a time when we sometimes feel that the problems of the globe will simply overwhelm our ability to control them, he provides a peerless guide to the ways in which the problems of politics have been thought about by the greatest minds of our civilization

About the Author: ALAN RYAN was born in London in 1940 and taught for many years at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of New College and Reader in Politics. He was Professor of Politics at Princeton from 1988 to 1996, when he returned to Oxford to become Warden of New College and Professor of Political Theory until his retirement in 2009. His previous books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Bibliographic Details

Title: On Politics History Political Thought ...
Publisher: Allen Lane
Publication Date: 2012
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good