Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts (Paperback)

Now greatly expanded in its second edition, Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts is ideal for survey courses in social and political philosophy. Offering coverage from antiquity to the present, this historically organized collection presents the most significant works from nearly 2,500 years of political philosophy. It moves from classical thought (Plato, Aristotle) through the medieval period (Augustine, Aquinas) to modern perspectives (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Hamilton and Madison, Kant). The book includes work from major nineteenth-century thinkers (Hegel, Marx and Engels, Mill) and twentieth-century theorists (Rawls, Nozick, Charles Taylor, Foucault, Habermas, Virginia Held) and also presents a variety of notable documents and addresses, including The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and speeches by Pericles, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The readings are substantial or complete texts, not fragments.