Perspectives on Classical Political and Social Thought – serie

Two important criticisms of contemporary liberalism turn to Aristotle's political thought for support - that which advocates participatory democracy, and that sympathetic to the rule of a virtuous or philosophic elite. In this commentary on Aristotle's politics the author explores how Aristotle offers political rule as an alternative to both the rule of aristocratic virtue and an unchecked participatory democracy. Writing in lucid prose, she offers an interpretation grounded in a close reading of the text, and combining a respectful and patient attempt to understand Aristotle in his own terms with a wide, sympathetic, and argumentative reading in the secondary literature.

As the Iron Curtain was shattered recently in Eastern Europe, revealing a diversity of cultural traditions lost during the recent past, so too the curtain which has hidden Karl Marx's writings for many years seems to be crumbling. Its disappearance reveals a rich complexity of traditions and visions that underlay his social, political, and economic theory. Marx and Aristotle brings together an outstanding multidisciplinary collection of recent scholarship, most written especially for this volume, to look further behind this historical veil by examining the influence of classical Greek philosophy, especially the thought of Aristotle and Epicurus, on Marx.

More clearly than any previous work on the subject, Michael Palmer's Love of Glory and the Common Good defines the relationship between Periclean democracy and the decline in Athenian political life that followed the death of Pericles. The author elaborates upon the views of Thucydides, who saw the subsequent tyrannical rule of Alcibiades and the accompanying disintegration of Athenian political life as a logical consequence of the defects in the speeches and deeds that Pericles used to inspire the Athenian people. With careful attention to details in the order and structure of Thucydides' narrative, Palmer shows this historian as a political thinker of the first rank who deserves the same careful study accorded to Plato and Aristotle.

As the Iron Curtain was shattered recently in Eastern Europe, revealing a diversity of cultural traditions lost during the recent past, so too the curtain which has hidden Karl Marx's writings for many years seems to be crumbling. Its disappearance reveals a rich complexity of traditions and visions that underlay his social, political, and economic theory. Marx and Aristotle brings together an outstanding multidisciplinary collection of recent scholarship, most written especially for this volume, to look further behind this historical veil by examining the influence of classical Greek philosophy, especially the thought of Aristotle and Epicurus, on Marx.