Political theory

Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics are the founding texts, one designing the perfect city and the other cataloguing the real ones, and every later book is a reply to them. Cicero and Augustine carried the question into Rome and the church. Aquinas’s treatise on law is the medieval answer, and Dante wrote a book on monarchy to argue that the emperor, not the pope, should rule the world.

The modern tradition begins with Machiavelli, who asked what rulers do rather than what they should, and runs through the social contract theorists, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, each of whom imagined people without a state and derived one from what they would agree to. Montesquieu found that liberty needed the powers separated. The Americans wrote all of this into law, and the Federalist Papers are the argument for the Constitution as it was being ratified. Burke answered the French Revolution and Paine answered Burke.

The nineteenth century added the two great critiques: Tocqueville on what democracy does to the soul, and Marx on what capitalism does to the class that works. Mill drew the liberal line. Weber, Arendt and King carry the form into the twentieth century. It is the shelf most assigned in the final year of every program.