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On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present
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Author
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Alan Ryan.
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Publisher
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Liveright
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Format
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2 vols.
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ISBN
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9780871404657
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Pages/Publication Date
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1152/2012
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Daedalus Item Code
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29723
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This item is not available.
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Description
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In this ambitious, sweeping two-volume history of political philosophy, the result of three decades of scholarship, political theory professor Alan Ryan chronicles three millennia of human thought and behavior. Ryan—also the biographer of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, who said that the role of philosophy is less to see truth than to enhance experience—traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I, and from Hobbes to the present age in Book II. Whether examining Lord Acton's dictum that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" or explicating John Stuart Mill's contention that it is "better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied," Ryan evokes the lives and minds of our greatest thinkers in a way that makes reading about them a transcendent experience. "Magisterial.... In more than a thousand pages, Alan Ryan, a longtime Oxford professor who now teaches at Princeton, undertakes to introduce the reader to most of the major political thinkers in Western history.... The tensions of modern liberal democratic societies are the intellectual motor of the book.... Lively and intellectually engaging ... On Politics, like the great works of philosophy it examines, constitutes a powerful brief against the unexamined life."—The New Yorker "Alan Ryan has created a vision of the entire surge of Western political thought which is equal to the heroic venture of George Sabine, which I studied in my youth. Ryan demonstrates throughout vivacity, and a tenacious grasp of the human meaning of everything that has transpired in political speculation from the ancients on through the threshold of our own dark age. I commend particularly his terse eloquence, his capacious erudition, and the verve and judicious intensity with which he somehow allows his whole being to inform his vast scope and deep concern of our human limitations."—Harold Bloom
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