Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction
• 2: Ancient political thought 800BCE – 30CE
• • 1: If your desire is for good, the people will be good, Confucius
  • 2: The art of war is of vital importance to the state, Sun Tzu
  • 3: Plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned, Mozi
  • 4: Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils, Plato
  • 5: Man is by nature a political animal, Aristotle
  • 6: A single wheel does not move, Chanakya
  • 7: If evil ministers enjoy safety and profit, this is the beginning of downfall, Han Fei Tzu
  • 8: The government is bandied about like a ball, Cicero
• 3: Medieval politics 30CE – 1515CE
• • 1: If justice be taken away, what are governments but great bands of robbers? Augustine of Hippo
  • 2: Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you, Muhammed
  • 3: The people refuse the rule of virtuous men, Al-Farabi
  • 4: No free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land, Barons of King John
  • 5: For war to be just, there is required a just cause, Thomas Aquinas
  • 6: To live politically means living in accordance with good laws, Giles of Rome
  • 7: The Church should devote itself to imitating Christ and give up its secular power, Marsilius of Padua
  • 8: Government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself, Ibn Khaldun
  • 9: A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word, Niccolo Machiavelli
• 4: Rationality and enlightenment 1515 - 1770
• • 1: In the beginning, everything was common to all, Francisco de Vitoria
  • 2: Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, Jean Bodin
  • 3: The natural law is the foundation of human law, Francisco Suarez
  • 4: Politics is the art of associating men, Johannes Althusius
  • 5: Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves, Hugo Grotius
  • 6: The condition of man is a condition of war, Thomas Hobbes
  • 7: The end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom, John Locke
  • 8: When legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, there can be no liberty, Montesquieu
  • 9: Independent entrepreneurs make good citizens, Benjamin Franklin
• 5: Revolutionary thoughts 1770 - 1848
• • 1: To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • 2: No generally valid principle of legislation can be based on happiness, Immanuel Kant
  • 3: The passions of individuals should be subjected, Edmund Burke
  • 4: Rights dependent on property are the most precarious, Thomas Paine
  • 5: All men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson
  • 6: Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, Johann Gottfried Herder
  • 7: Government has but a choice of evils, Jeremy Bentham
  • 8: The people have a right to keep and bear arms, James Madison
  • 9: The most respectable women are the most oppressed, Mary Wollstonecraft
  • 10: The slave feels self-existence to be something external, Georg Hegel
  • 11: War is the continuation of Politik by other means, Carl von Clausewitz
  • 12: An educated and wise government recognizes the developmental needs of its society, Jose Maria Luis Mora
  • 13: A state too extensive in itself ultimately falls into decay, Simon Bolivar
  • 14: Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist, John C. Calhoun
  • 15: The tendency to attack “the family” is a symptom of social chaos, Auguste Comte
• 6: The rise of the masses 1848 – 1910
• • 1: Socialism is a new system of serfdom, Alexis de Tocqueville
  • 2: Say not I, but we, Giuseppe Mazzini
  • 3: That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time, John Stuart Mill
  • 4: No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent, Abraham Lincoln
  • 5: Property is theft, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  • 6: The privileged man is a man depraved in intellect and heart, Mikhail Bakunin
  • 7: That government is best which governs not at all, Henry David Thoreau
  • 8: Communism is the riddle of history solved, Karl Marx
  • 9: The men who proclaimed the republic became the assassins of freedom, Alexander Herzen
  • 10: We must look for a central axis for our nation, Ito Hirobumi
  • 11: The will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 12: It is the myth that is alone important, Georges Sorel
  • 13: We have to take working men as they are, Eduard Bernstein
  • 14: The disdain of our formidable neighbour is the greatest danger for Latin America, Jose Marti
  • 15: It is necessary to dare in order to succeed, Peter Kropotkin
  • 16: Either women are to be killed, or women are to have the vote, Emmeline Pankhurst
  • 17: It is ridiculous to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, Theodor Herzl
  • 18: Nothing will avail to save a nation whose workers have decayed, Beatrice Webb
  • 19: Protective legislation in America is shamefully inadequate, Jane Addams
  • 20: Land to the tillers! Sun Yat-Sen
  • 21: The individual is a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism, Max Weber
• 7: The clash of ideologies 1910 – 1945
• • 1: Non-violence is the first article of my faith, Mahatma Gandhi
  • 2: Politics begin where the masses are, Vladimir Lenin
  • 3: The mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability, Rosa Luxemburg
  • 4: An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last, Winston Churchill
  • 5: The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing, Giovanni Gentile
  • 6: The wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence, Joseph Stalin
  • 7: If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end? Leon Trotsky
  • 8: We will unite Mexicans by giving guarantees to the peasant and the businessman, Emiliano Zapata
  • 8: War is a racket, Smedley D. Butler
  • 9: Sovereignty is not given, it is taken, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  • 10: Europe has been left without a moral code, Jose Ortega y Gasset
  • 11: We are 400 million people asking for liberty, Marcus Garvey
  • 12: India cannot really be free unless separated from the British empire, Manabendra Nath Roy
  • 13: Sovereign is he who decides on the exception, Carl Schmitt
  • 14: Communism is as bad as imperialism, Jomo Kenyatta
  • 15: The state must be conceived of as an “educator”, Antonio Gramsci
  • 16: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong
• 8: Post-war politics 1945 – present
• • 1: The chief evil is unlimited government, Friedrich Hayek
  • 2: Parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system, Michael Oakeshott
  • 3: The objective of the Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system, Abul Ala Maududi
  • 4: There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men, Ayn Rand
  • 5: Every known and established fact can be denied, Hannah Arendt
  • 6: What is a woman? Simone de Beauvoir
  • 7: No natural object is solely a resource, Arne Naess
  • 8: We are not anti-white, we are against white supremacy, Nelson Mandela
  • 9: Only the weak-minded believe that politics is a place of collaboration, Gianfranco Miglio
  • 10: During the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed tend to become oppressors, Paulo Freire
  • 11: Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, John Rawls
  • 12: Colonialism is violence in its natural state, Frantz Fanon
  • 13: The ballot or the bullet, Malcolm X
  • 14: We need to “cut off the king’s head”, Michel Foucault
  • 15: Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves, Che Guevara
  • 16: Everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy, Noam Chomsky
  • 17: Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance, Martin Luther King
  • 18: Perestroika unites socialism with democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev
  • 19: The intellectuals erroneously fought Islam, Ali Shariati
  • 20: The hellishness of war drives us to break with every restraint, Michael Walzer
  • 21: No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified, Robert Nozick
  • 22: No Islamic law says violate women’s rights, Shirin Ebadi
  • 23: Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation, Robert Pape
• 9: Directory
• 10: Glossary
• 11: Index
• 12: Acknowledgements

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Fascinating material, well presented
*The Psychologist (Review of The Psychology Book)*