Library

An individual whose work is studied directly.

• Socratesc. 469/470–399 BCEAthenian philosopher of examination, elenchus, care of the soul and intellectual humility whose trial and refusal to escape made the relation between philosophy, law and political community a permanent problem.
• Platoc. 428/427–348/347 BCEAthenian philosopher who links justice, psychic order, education, knowledge and political authority, most radically in The Republic and later through law and civic formation in Laws.
• Aristotle384–322 BCEGreek philosopher who joins ethics and politics through flourishing, virtue, practical judgment, citizenship, constitutional analysis, common advantage, law, faction and civic education.
• Cicero106–43 BCERoman statesman, orator and philosopher who connects republican institutions, natural law, rhetoric, civic virtue and statesmanship to the preservation of a free commonwealth.
• Augustine354–430Christian theologian and philosopher who reorients Roman political thought around disordered love, the two cities, limited earthly peace, coercive authority and the limits of political justice.
• al-Farabic. 870–950Philosopher of human perfection and political association who connects felicity, the Active Intellect, the excellent city, philosophical-prophetic rulership, religion and the diagnosis of deficient political ends.
• Maimonides1138–1204Jewish philosopher, jurist and physician who connects political association, revealed law, prophecy, interpretation and intellectual perfection.
• Thomas Aquinasc. 1225–1274Christian theologian and philosopher who integrates Aristotelian political thought with a Christian account of natural and supernatural ends, natural law, common good, government and just war.
• Niccolò Machiavelli1469–1527Florentine political thinker who reorients political analysis toward effectual truth, historical contingency, virtù, fortuna, political necessity, reputation, republican liberty, institutional conflict, corruption and renewal.
• Thomas Hobbes1588–1679Political philosopher who reconstructs authority from desire, vulnerability, competing private judgment and the problem of insecurity, arguing for an authorized sovereign capable of securing peace.
• John Locke1632–1704Political philosopher of natural equality, natural law, property, consent, limited government, toleration, rule of law, and the right to resist abused political trust.
• Montesquieu1689–1755 · Charles-Louis de SecondatFrench political thinker who explains forms of rule, social conditions of law and the protection of political liberty through moderate government and power checking power.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778Genevan political thinker who traces the social origins of inequality, amour-propre and dependence, then asks how popular sovereignty, general law and civic formation might make freedom possible in political society.
• Edmund Burke1729–1797Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker whose practical politics joins inherited constitutionalism, prescription, prudence, natural law, representation, reform, and a powerful critique of abstract revolutionary reconstruction.
• John Stuart Mill1806–1873Liberal and utilitarian philosopher of individual liberty, free discussion, individuality, social tyranny, representative government, moral progress, and the equality of women.
• Karl Marx1818–1883Political and social theorist of alienation, material production, ideology, class struggle, capitalism, exploitation, revolution, and human emancipation, developed partly in collaboration with Friedrich Engels.
• Emma Goldman1869–1940Anarchist political thinker and activist who defends individual and social freedom against coercive government, property domination and majority conformity, while emphasizing voluntary association, direct action and the creative role of dissenting minorities.
• Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Philosopher and critic of morality who develops genealogy, nihilism, ressentiment and will to power to question inherited values, the authority of truth and morality, and the formation of modern subjects and political identities.
• Hannah Arendt1906–1975Political theorist of totalitarianism, statelessness, human rights, plurality, action, natality, power and the public realm, who treats politics as a space where distinct persons can appear and act together.
• Steven Lukes1941–Political and social theorist whose three-dimensional account of power widened the study of domination from visible decisions to agenda control and the shaping of preferences and perceived interests.

A movement or tradition treated as a unit.

• The SophistsFifth-century BCE teachers and intellectualsA diverse group of travelling teachers and thinkers who made rhetoric, civic education, convention, political competence and the relation between persuasion and truth central problems of classical political thought.

A supporting idea used across several pages.

• Active IntellectA separate intellect in al-Farabi’s cosmology that helps actualize human understanding and plays a central role in his accounts of felicity, prophecy and philosophical rulership.
• AlienationA condition in which human activity, products, social relations or powers confront people as external and dominating rather than as forms of self-directed social activity; central to the early Marx.
• AnarchismA family of political theories and movements that criticize coercive hierarchy and the state while seeking forms of social order based on voluntary association, mutual aid, autonomy and non-domination.
• AppetiteepithumiaPlato's concept of the desiring part of the soul, developed through distinctions among necessary, unnecessary and lawless desires and used to connect moral psychology to regime character, education and political decline.
• AuthorizationHobbes’s device by which a person makes another’s act count as an act performed on the author’s behalf; in Leviathan, the mechanism through which many individuals become one represented political person.
• CitizenshipMembership, participation and the boundary of political ruleCitizenship identifies who belongs to the political body, what rights and duties accompany membership, and how citizens participate in rule. Classical political thought makes visible both the intensity of citizen participation and the exclusions that define the citizen body.
• Class struggleConflict among social classes whose positions are structured by relations of production; Marx and Engels use it to explain political conflict and historical transformation under class society.
• Common goodThe common good asks what political association and public power are for, and whether they serve a genuinely shared political purpose rather than the private advantage of rulers or factions.
• DespotismGovernment dominated by arbitrary will rather than reliable limits, and the problem of how fear and concentrated power threaten liberty across regime types.
• Direct actionPolitical action undertaken directly by people to resist, disrupt or transform a social relation rather than relying primarily on representatives or established institutional channels.
• Effectual truthMachiavelli’s ‘effectual truth’ is a methodological demand to judge politics through how people and institutions actually behave and through the consequences actions produce, rather than treating imagined orders or inherited moral labels as sufficient guides.
• Felicity (saʿāda)al-Farabi’s technical term for the highest human perfection, especially intellectual actualization, and the normative standard by which excellent and deficient political associations are distinguished.
• Forms and the GoodPlato’s account of stable intelligible standards and the Form of the Good, which the Republic uses to distinguish knowledge from opinion and to justify the education and authority of philosopher-rulers.
• FortunaMachiavelli’s fortuna names the changing circumstances, opportunities and shocks political actors cannot fully control; virtù is the capacity to prepare for, respond to and sometimes exploit that contingency without abolishing it.
• GenealogyA critical method that traces how values, practices and identities emerge through contingent struggles, reinterpretations and relations of power rather than treating them as timeless or self-evident.
• Harm principleMill’s principle that coercive interference with a competent adult is justified for the protection of others rather than simply for that person’s own good.
• Historical materialismA family of interpretations of Marx in which material production, productive forces, relations of production and class relations play a structuring role in historical change.
• Human emancipationMarx’s contrast with merely political emancipation: freedom would require transforming the social relations that generate dependence, alienation and class domination, not only equal legal citizenship.
• IdeologyFor Marx and Engels, a changing family of problems involving forms of consciousness that invert, naturalize, or express social relations and class positions rather than transparently describing them.
• IndividualityThe development of a person’s own capacities, character and way of life rather than passive conformity to prevailing custom; for Mill, individuality is both a component and a source of human well-being.
• Intermediary bodiesCourts, estates and corporate institutions situated between rulers and subjects, capable of checking centralized power while sometimes entrenching unequal privileges.
• JusticeWhat is due, to whom, and by what standard?A foundational political concept for evaluating persons, actions, laws, distributions and institutions by asking what is due, who counts, and which standards can justify political arrangements.
• KallipolisPlato’s ‘beautiful city’ in the Republic: a city in speech organized around specialization, guardian education, philosopher-rule and justice as the proper ordering of differentiated functions.
• LawRules, authority, justice and political orderLaw is the organised public order of rules, institutions and procedures through which political communities regulate conduct and exercise authority, while political philosophy asks what makes law valid, authoritative, legitimate and just.
• Mass societyA condition in which individuals are socially atomized or organized primarily as an undifferentiated mass, weakening durable associations, independent judgment or plural forms of collective life.
• NatalityArendt’s name for the human capacity to begin something new; because each person is born as a newcomer, action always contains an element of initiative and unpredictability.
• Natural lawA family of arguments in which standards discoverable through reason and nature can bind or judge political action independently of mere enactment; its meaning changes substantially from Cicero and Aquinas through Hobbes and Locke.
• Nature and principle of governmentMontesquieu's distinction between how political authority is structured and the social motive that animates its operation: virtue, honour and fear.
• NihilismFor Nietzsche, the crisis in which inherited highest values lose their binding force or undermine themselves, leaving modern culture unable simply to rely on the moral and metaphysical foundations it has inherited.
• PeacePeace is a political good whose meaning changes across the course: it may name civic order, a limited temporal achievement, or a rational escape from conditions of insecurity and war.
• Philosophy, religion & revelationMedieval political thinkers ask how philosophical knowledge, revealed law, prophecy and political guidance relate when citizens differ in their capacities and routes to understanding.
• PluralityFor Arendt, the condition that human beings are equal enough to understand one another yet distinct enough that speech and action are needed for each person to appear as someone unique.
• Polisthe Greek city-stateThe classical Greek political community: a historically specific association in which citizenship, constitution, law, public speech, civic identity and competing accounts of the good life are joined.
• Political absolutismThe claim that political authority is final or effectively unlimited within its sphere; early-modern versions differ sharply in their grounds, structure, and relation to arbitrary power.
• Political corruptionThe decay of civic and institutional capacity by which laws, habits and power relations cease to sustain the political purposes they once served; in Machiavelli, especially the loss of a republic’s ability to preserve liberty.
• Political PhilosophyReasoned inquiry into political values, concepts, principles and institutions, asking how collective arrangements can be justified, criticized or redesigned.
• Political ScienceThe systematic and methodologically plural study of political institutions, behaviour, power, ideas, collective decisions and political change.
• Political ThoughtThe activity and historical study of arguments, concepts, texts and traditions through which political life is interpreted, justified, criticized and reimagined.
• PowerThe capacity to shape political action, outcomes, agendas and, on deeper accounts, the formation of preferences and perceived interests.
• PrescriptionA political claim acquires weight through long, settled possession and inherited practice; in Burke, prescription helps explain why institutions and rights can command allegiance without being reconstructed from first principles.
• PrudencePractical judgment about how general moral and political considerations should be applied under particular circumstances, especially where institutions, consequences and competing goods cannot be reduced to one rule.
• Republican libertyA form of political freedom associated with protection from domination, active civic power and institutions that prevent any one social force from controlling the whole political order.
• RessentimentNietzsche’s term for a reactive form of valuation in which frustrated hostility is redirected into moral judgment, helping produce a reversal of values around innocence, guilt, good and evil.
• Right to have rightsArendt’s formulation of the prior political condition of rights: having a place in a community where one can appear, act, speak and have claims recognized as meaningful.
• Separation of powersThe division of legislative, executive and judicial functions and the mutual restraints that prevent any one authority from becoming unchecked.
• Social contractA family of arguments that constructs political authority from agreement among persons rather than natural political hierarchy; Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau use the device to build sharply different accounts of sovereignty, obligation and freedom.
• Social tyrannyInformal domination by prevailing opinion, custom and social pressure that can constrain thought and conduct even without legal prohibition.
• SovereigntySovereignty concerns where final public lawmaking authority is located and how a political community attributes binding public decisions; Hobbes and Rousseau both insist on finality and indivisibility while constructing radically different sovereign subjects.
• State of natureA family of early-modern thought experiments and genealogical baselines used to ask what relations among persons look like without common political authority; Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau construct importantly different versions.
• Surplus valueIn Marx’s critique of political economy, the excess produced by labour over the value represented in wages, forming the basis from which profit and related revenues are derived.
• TotalitarianismArendt’s term for a modern form of domination organized around ideology, terror, atomization and the attempt to eliminate spontaneity and plurality rather than merely monopolize ordinary political power.
• Tripartite soulPlato's account of reason, spirit and appetite: why inner conflict suggests distinct motivations, how justice orders them, and what the city–soul analogy can establish.
• Utility and the greatest-happiness principleA consequentialist standard that evaluates conduct and institutions by their effects on happiness or well-being; Mill revises the Benthamite inheritance by stressing qualitative pleasures, character, liberty and justice.
• VirtùMachiavellian virtù names the flexible capacities needed for effective political action under changing circumstances; its resemblance to “virtue” should not be mistaken for conceptual identity.
• Virtue / AretêExcellence, character and political formationVirtue or aretê is excellence of person, citizen or role. Classical political thought asks what makes humans and citizens excellent, whether excellence can be taught, how character is formed, and how law and institutions cultivate or corrupt it.
• Will to powerNietzsche’s contested account of life and interpretation as dynamic relations of force, overcoming and resistance; it is not reducible to a simple desire for political domination over others.

A major authored text or body of writing treated as an object of study.

• The RepublicPlato · dialogue · c. 4th century BCEA staged inquiry into why justice is worth choosing, moving from challenges about power and advantage through the city–soul analogy, education and philosopher-rule to regime decline, tyranny, poetry and the final choice of a just life.
• LawsPlato · dialogue · late 4th century BCEPlato’s legislative design of Magnesia, emphasizing virtue, civic education, legal preludes, property, constitutional offices, religion and the Nocturnal Council.
• Nicomachean EthicsAristotle · ethical treatise · 4th century BCEAristotle’s major ethical work on eudaimonia, virtue, habituation, practical wisdom, justice, friendship and contemplation, and a foundation for his Politics.
• PoliticsAristotle · political treatise · 4th century BCEAristotle's analysis of the polis, citizenship, constitutions, political justice, law, faction, the middle class, the best attainable regime, and civic education.
• On the RepublicCicero · philosophical dialogue · c. 54–51 BCE · fragmentaryCicero’s account of the commonwealth, mixed constitution, Roman constitutional history, justice, statesmanship and the Dream of Scipio.
• On the LawsCicero · philosophical dialogue · c. 52 BCE · incompleteCicero’s movement from right reason and natural law to human fellowship, civic religion, magistracy and the legal architecture of a republic.
• ConfessionsAugustine · autobiographical-theological work · c. 397–400Augustine’s account of restless desire, disordered love, divided will, memory, time and conversion, emphasizing the political anthropology that underlies his later thought.
• The City of GodAugustine · theological-apologetic work · 413–426Augustine’s twenty-two-book response to Roman pagan criticism and his most important work for political thought: Rome and glory, the two cities, peace, justice, domination, war and the limits of earthly politics.
• The Virtuous Cityal-Farabi · philosophical-political treatise · 10th centuryal-Farabi’s movement from metaphysical and psychological order through human cooperation to the excellent city, the First Ruler, political religion and deficient political ends.
• The Political Regimeal-Farabi · philosophical-political treatise · 10th centuryal-Farabi’s movement from cosmic and psychological order through human felicity and association to the excellent city, philosophical-prophetic rulership and the diagnosis of deficient political ends.
• Mishneh TorahMaimonides · code of Jewish law · late 12th centuryMaimonides’s fourteen-book legal system, emphasizing formation, civil order, courts, kingship, war and messianic restoration as parts of one comprehensive legal-political architecture.
• The Guide of the PerplexedMaimonides · philosophical-theological work · completed c. 1190Maimonides’ philosophical masterpiece on scriptural interpretation, God, creation, prophecy, providence, law and human perfection, written for readers troubled by apparent conflicts between philosophy and revelation.
• Summa TheologiaeThomas Aquinas · theological synthesis · 1265–1273 · unfinishedThe Summa’s political and legal architecture: human ends, practical reason, law, natural law, human legislation, unjust law, common good, justice, coercion and just war.
• On KingshipThomas Aquinas · political treatise · c. 1265–1272 · unfinishedAquinas’s argument from common political ends to government, the attraction of unified monarchy, the corruption of tyranny, prudential resistance and the ruler’s common-good office.
• The PrinceNiccolò Machiavelli · political treatise · written 1513; published 1532Machiavelli’s analysis of acquiring, founding and preserving principalities through arms, political judgment, reputation, necessity, virtù and fortuna.
• Discourses on LivyNiccolò Machiavelli · republican-political treatise · c. 1513–1519Machiavelli’s three-book study of Roman republican liberty, social conflict, founding, citizen arms, religion, corruption, extraordinary power and institutional renewal.
• De CiveThomas Hobbes · political treatise · 1642Hobbes’s movement from equality, fear and natural liberty through laws of nature, covenant and sovereign dominion to subject obligation and civil authority over public religion.
• LeviathanThomas Hobbes · political-philosophical treatise · 1651Hobbes’s movement from desire, equality and insecurity through natural right, covenant and authorization to sovereignty, subject liberty and civil control of religious authority.
• First Treatise of GovernmentJohn Locke · political treatise · 1689Locke’s critical first half of the Two Treatises, focused on Robert Filmer’s patriarchal account and its rejection.
• Second Treatise of GovernmentJohn Locke · political treatise · 1689Locke’s account of natural equality, property, consent, limited government, tyranny and resistance explains how political authority can arise among free persons and how it can be forfeited.
• A Letter Concerning TolerationJohn Locke · political-religious essay · 1689Locke’s argument for religious toleration distinguishes civil government from churches, limits coercion to civil interests, and argues that force cannot produce genuine belief.
• The Spirit of the LawsMontesquieu · political and legal treatise · 1748Montesquieu's account of how laws relate to social conditions, how regimes are sustained and corrupted, and why liberty requires constitutional powers that restrain one another.
• Discourse on the Origin of InequalityJean-Jacques Rousseau · philosophical discourse · 1755Rousseau’s genealogy of social inequality traces a development from natural independence through comparison, property and political institutions to dependence and domination.
• Of the Social ContractJean-Jacques Rousseau · political treatise · 1762Rousseau’s account of legitimate political order joins the social pact, popular sovereignty, the general will, law and government in an attempt to reconcile political obedience with freedom.
• Reflections on the Revolution in FranceEdmund Burke · political reflections · 1790Burke’s sustained response to the French Revolution, defending inherited institutions, prescription, prudence, social continuity, and reform against political reconstruction from abstract rights alone.
• Speech to the Electors of BristolEdmund Burke · parliamentary speech · 1774Burke’s compact statement of representative judgment: a representative owes constituents attention and service, but not the surrender of independent judgment to local instructions.
• UtilitarianismJohn Stuart Mill · moral philosophy · 1861/1863Mill’s defense and revision of utilitarian ethics, including the greatest-happiness principle, qualitative differences among pleasures, moral sanctions, and the relation between utility and justice.
• On LibertyJohn Stuart Mill · political essay · 1859Mill’s defense of liberty of thought, discussion, individuality and self-regarding action against both legal coercion and social conformity, organized around the harm principle.
• The Subjection of WomenJohn Stuart Mill · political essay · 1869Mill’s argument that the legal and social subordination of women is unjust, historically produced rather than proven natural, and incompatible with liberty, equality and human improvement.
• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844Karl Marx · manuscripts · 1844Early Marx’s analysis of alienated labour, species-being, private property and communism, linking political economy to a theory of human self-realization.
• The German IdeologyKarl Marx & Friedrich Engels · manuscripts · 1845–1846Marx and Engels turn from idealist explanations toward material production, division of labour, social relations, ideology and the historical development of forms of society.
• Manifesto of the Communist PartyKarl Marx & Friedrich Engels · political manifesto · 1848A compressed theory and intervention presenting modern history through class struggle, the revolutionary development of capitalism, proletarian organization, communist aims, and political transformation.
• Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyKarl Marx · theoretical preface · 1859Marx’s compact statement of the relation among material production, social relations, legal-political forms and historical transformation, later central to debates over historical materialism.
• Value, Price and ProfitKarl Marx · economic address · 1865Marx’s accessible account of wages, value, surplus value, profit and trade-union struggle, connecting political economy to the bargaining position of workers under capitalism.
• Anarchism and Other EssaysEmma Goldman · essay collection · 1910A collection of essays on anarchism, majority rule, political violence, prisons, patriotism, education, sexuality and women’s emancipation; the assigned reading centers on “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” and “Minorities Versus Majorities.”
• Beyond Good and EvilFriedrich Nietzsche · philosophical work · 1886Nietzsche’s critique of inherited morality and philosophical dogmatism, examining herd obedience, value creation, rank, self-overcoming and the forces that shape moral and political life.
• The Origins of TotalitarianismHannah Arendt · political theory and history · 1951Arendt’s analysis of antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarian domination; the assigned selection emphasizes mass society, atomization, total loyalty, ideology, terror and the destruction of political plurality.

Historical, political or intellectual background.

• Classical AthensDemocracy, empire, war and intellectual conflictThe institutional and historical setting of fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athenian political thought: direct citizen participation, restricted citizenship, empire, war, constitutional crisis and a public culture of argument.
• RomeRepublic to late empireRoman political life developed from republican institutions and elite competition into imperial rule, law and claims of Roman peace across a vast Mediterranean polity.
• Sack of Rome410 CEThe 410 CE sack of Rome shocked the Roman world and intensified debate about imperial decline, Christianity, civic loyalty and the meaning of Roman power.
• Medieval transmission of Greek philosophySyriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin intellectual routesGreek philosophy was translated, interpreted and transformed across medieval linguistic and religious communities, shaping the intellectual worlds in which al-Farabi, Maimonides and Aquinas worked.
• Renaissance FlorenceRepublic, Medici restoration and Italian interstate conflictFlorence combined republican constitutional experiments, Medici restoration, chancery government and military vulnerability within the competitive Italian state system of the Renaissance.
• English Civil WarCivil conflict and the problem of final political authoritySeventeenth-century England experienced escalating conflict over crown, Parliament, religion, jurisdiction and military authority, culminating in civil war, regicide, Commonwealth and Protectorate.
• Restoration England and the Glorious RevolutionShaftesbury, Exclusion politics, exile, and the settlement of 1688–89Restoration England repeatedly renegotiated monarchy, Parliament, religion and law before the Revolution settlement of 1688–89 reconfigured crown and political nation.
• Early Enlightenment Europe: monarchy, commerce and constitutional alternativesFrance, England, the Dutch Republic and their wider political world · c. 1685–1750European institutions around 1700: French royal power and corporate privilege, English and Dutch constitutional arrangements, commerce, confessional conflict, and unequal claims to liberty.
• Geneva and the EnlightenmentRepublican self-government, Parisian intellectual culture, and Rousseau’s critique of modern societyEighteenth-century Geneva was a small Protestant republic marked by unequal citizenship, republican institutions and participation in wider Enlightenment networks.
• Absolutist France and the Ancien RégimeThe political and social order of pre-revolutionary France: royal centralization, legal privilege, social estates, religious establishment, and the limits of “absolute” monarchy in practice.
• The French Revolution and the crisis of the Ancien RégimeThe collapse of the French monarchy and revolutionary reconstruction of authority, rights, representation, property and social order from 1789 transformed European political argument.
• Nineteenth-century Britain: reform, industry, and mass societyNineteenth-century Britain combined industrialization, urban growth, parliamentary reform, expanding print culture and organized movements with debates over democracy, empire, conformity and women’s legal status.
• Industrial capitalism and the revolutions of 1848European industrialization, urban working-class formation, political repression and liberal, nationalist, democratic and socialist movements converged in the revolutionary crises of 1848.
• Anarchism, industrial society, and mass politicsThe late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century setting of industrial capitalism, labor conflict, immigration, state repression and expanding mass politics within which anarchist movements debated freedom, organization and direct action.
• Late nineteenth-century Europe: nation, mass society, and changing moral authorityLate nineteenth-century Europe was reshaped by industrialization, national unification, mass politics, scientific authority and changing religious life, producing competing claims about morality, culture and political belonging.
• Statelessness, totalitarianism, and Europe’s age of catastropheEurope’s twentieth-century collapse of empires, mass displacement, statelessness, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and the Holocaust transformed the conditions of rights, membership and political violence.
• Ancient GreecePolis, citizenship, constitutions and political conflictThe plural political world of the Greek poleis in which citizenship, constitutions, public speech, religion, war and civic identity formed the context for classical political thought.

Comparisons

Written deliberately by an editor as their own argument — never assembled automatically from the entries they discuss.

• al-Farabi and MaimonidesPhilosophy, prophecy, law, and political teachingHow Maimonides inherits Farabian problems of political association, prophecy and differentiated audiences while transforming them inside a Jewish legal and theological framework.
• Aquinas and LockeNatural law, political authority and the limits of governmentHow Aquinas and Locke both ground political authority in a moral order prior to government while differing over the common good, natural rights, property, consent, lawmaking and the grounds of resistance.
• Aristotle and MachiavelliEnds, institutions, conflict and political judgmentHow Aristotle and Machiavelli both study regimes, conflict, institutions and political durability while diverging over virtue, political ends, historical method and the meaning of effective action.
• Augustine and AquinasFrom limited earthly peace to a positive natural politicsHow Aquinas preserves Augustine’s Christian limits on politics while giving natural political life, law and common good a stronger positive status.
• Cicero and MachiavelliRepublican liberty, conflict, corruption and political preservationHow Cicero and Machiavelli both defend republican political life and durable institutions while diverging over natural law, social conflict, corruption, civic virtue and the means by which liberty is preserved.
• Hobbes and LockeState of nature, consent, law and resistanceHow Hobbes and Locke begin from natural equality and pre-political rights yet diverge over the state of nature, property, the location of final authority, the rule of law and the right of resistance.
• Hobbes and RousseauState of nature, dependence and sovereigntyHow Rousseau challenges Hobbes’s account of natural humanity while sharing his concern with political unity, then reconstructs sovereignty, freedom and civil association on radically different foundations.
• Locke and RousseauFreedom, property, consent and popular sovereigntyHow Locke and Rousseau begin from natural freedom and equality yet diverge over human development, property, dependence, representation, sovereignty and the political conditions of freedom.
• Machiavelli and HobbesPolitical order, conflict and authorityHow Machiavelli and Hobbes reconstruct political order around insecurity, conflict, human motivation and effective authority while diverging over method, sovereignty, liberty and the political uses of conflict.
• Machiavelli and RousseauRepublican freedom, corruption, civic formation and political renewalHow Machiavelli and Rousseau both diagnose domination, corruption and civic dependence while diverging over human development, political conflict, popular sovereignty, civic formation and the meaning of republican freedom.
• Plato and AristotleKnowledge, justice and constitutional judgmentA comparison of Plato and Aristotle on justice, knowledge, citizenship, education, regime change and the relation between ideal order and feasible political judgment.
• Plato and HobbesJustice, political order and the problem of authorityHow Plato and Hobbes connect political order to human psychology while sharply disagreeing over whether justice is prior to law, what authorizes rule and what political institutions are for.
• Political Science and Political PhilosophyDifferent questions, shared political worldA comparison of political science and political philosophy as overlapping forms of inquiry distinguished chiefly by characteristic questions, warrants and modes of justification.
• Virtue and VirtùFrom excellence of character to political capacityHow Machiavelli transforms an inherited vocabulary of excellence: what remains of virtue when political success must be judged under necessity, uncertainty and changing fortune.