Political Theory

• • The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
    MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.

• • Politics by Aristotle
    Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

• • The Republic by Plato
    The first care of the rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality, and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry, and greater harmony of the individual and the State. We are thus led on to the conception of a higher State, in which “no man calls anything his own,”

• • The Second Treatise of Civil Government by John Locke
    To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

• • The Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay
    AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.

• • The Third Wave of Democratization by Samuel P. Huntington
    Huntington refers to the widespread international push toward democracy during this period as the “third wave” (not to be confused with Alvin Toffler’s “third wave” which became the byword of people like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s).

• • The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria
    Democracy has reshaped politics, economics, and culture around the world. This provocative book asks, can you have too much of a good thing?

• • The Spirit of Laws by Baron de Montesquieu
    Of the Relation of Laws to different Beings. Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity1 His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

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