The Key Texts of Political Philosophy

Thomas L. Pangle holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in the Department of Government and is Co-Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has won Guggenheim, Killam-Canada Council, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and four National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He has been awarded the Benton Bowl (for contribution to education in politics) by Yale University and the Robert Foster Cherry Great Teacher of the World Prize by Baylor University. At the invitation of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, he delivered the Werner Heisenberg Memorial Lecture at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. He is the author of many books, most recently Aristotle's Teaching in the Politics (2013). Timothy W. Burns is Professor of Government at Baylor University. He is the author of Shakespeare's Political Wisdom and the editor of After History?: Francis Fukuyama and his Critics and the Companion to Leo Strauss' Writings on Classical Political Thought (forthcoming). He is also co-editor, with Bryan-Paul Frost, of Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Re-examining the Debate Between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, and co-editor, with Peter Augustine Lawler, of The Future of Liberal Education. He has translated Marcellinus' Life of Thucydides and is the author of articles on Homer, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Bacon, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Chesterton, Strauss, Fukuyama, Putnam, John Courtney Murray, and modern liberal republican theory.

'Pangle and Burns manage the impressive achievement of presenting textually sensitive readings of the major philosophers and texts in the history of political philosophy, while at the same time bringing out the human meaning, significance, and relevance of what the philosophers are saying. Pangle and Burns help the students see that they are actually being addressed by these philosophers - with a message of importance for their lives and communities.' Michael Zuckert, University of Notre Dame

• Part I. Classical Political Philosophy: 1. Plato's Apology of Socrates; 2. Plato's Republic, book one; 3. Aristotle's Politics; Part II. Biblical Political Theology: 4. The Bible; 5. St Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law; Part III. Modern Political Philosophy: 6. Machiavelli's Discourses and Prince; 7. Bacon's New Atlantis; 8. Hobbes's Leviathan; 9. Locke's Second Treatise of Government; 10. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; Part IV. Modernity in Question: 11. Rousseau's First and Second Discourses; 12. Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto; 13. Tocqueville's Democracy in America; 14. Nietzsche and his Zarathustra.