About the Author

Alan Ryan, the former warden of New College, Oxford, has taught political theory at Oxford and Princeton since 1969. His books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life and Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education.

Reviews

In a work of astonishing scope and ambition, Alan Ryan, surveying the whole vast field, concisely charts the welter of conflicting positions and tracks the sometimes thrilling, sometimes catastrophic consequences of political thought
*Stephen Greenblatt*

Ryan demonstrates vivacity throughout, and a tenacious grasp of the human meaning of everything that has transpired in political speculation from the ancients on through the threshold of our own dark age. I commend particularly his terse eloquence, his capacious erudition, and the judicious intensity with which he somehow allows his whole being to inform his vast scope and deep concern of our human limitations
*Harold Bloom*

Those disillusioned and distressed by contemporary politics may find themselves renewed by turning to this book. They would certainly get the long view, in every sense, while immersing themselves in more than 1000 pages of Western political thought. Ryan (political theory, retired, Univ. of Oxford; The Making of Modern Liberalism) now presents reviewers with a difficulty: his prior works have already been described as "magisterial"-what word to use now? Perhaps best to quote the author himself, which the reviewer could happily do from any page. Here, for example, is Ryan on Karl Marx: "a frustrated academic with a professor's incapacity to finish anything properly, a man of many deep insights who was unable to complete any project before being distracted by the next." Thankfully, Ryan, to whom this book was first suggested as a project more than 30 years ago, possessed more discipline than Marx and has now finished this analytical overview-written with wit, grace, and lucidity-encompassing every major thinker since the Greeks on this eternally contentious human endeavor. VERDICT There is a danger that the publisher's boxed presentation of these two volumes will suggest simply a handsome object rather than a superb book that both general and academic readers will relish. Very highly recommended.-Robert Nardini, Niagara Falls, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.