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Three decades in the making, one of the most ambitious and comprehensive histories of political philosophy in nearly a century.
Both a history and an examination of human thought and behavior spanning three thousand years, On Politics thrillingly traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I and from Hobbes to the present age in Book II. Whether examining Lord Acton’s dictum that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” or explicating John Stuart Mill’s contention that it is “better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” Alan Ryan evokes the lives and minds of our greatest thinkers in a way that makes reading about them a transcendent experience. Whether writing about Plato or Augustine, de Toqueville or Thomas Jefferson, Ryan brings a wisdom to his text that illuminates John Dewey’s belief that the role of philosophy is less to see truth than to enhance experience. With this unparalleled tour de force, Ryan emerges in his own right as one of the most influential political philosophers of our time.- Sales Rank: #159936 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Liveright
- Published on: 2012-10-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.80" h x 3.70" w x 6.70" l, 4.62 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 1152 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“With an unmatched magisterial command, Alan Ryan powerfully reminds and teaches us how the leading thinkers since classic times can and must inform our debates over how to envision the better world we must build.” (Anthony W. Marx, President, New York Public Library)
“Alan Ryan has created a vision of the entire surge of Western political thought which is equal to the heroic venture of George Sabine, which I studied in my youth. Ryan demonstrates throughout vivacity, and a tenacious grasp of the human meaning of everything that has transpired in political speculation from the ancients on through the threshhold of our own dark age. I commend particularly his terse eloquence, his capacious erudition, and the verve and judicious intensity with which he somehow allows his whole being to inform his vast scope and deep concern of our human limitations.” (Harold Bloom)
“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, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)
“If you want to understand why we think as we do, go back to the ancient Greeks. Alan Ryan brilliantly explains why that is true―and why it matters.” (Mary Beard, author of The Roman Triumph)
“Alan Ryan has taken a vast range of challenging material written over twenty five centuries in the West and engaged with it in prose of stunning clarity. He displays the intrinsic interest of reflection on writers from Herodotus to yesterday, while showing how it can be a powerful resource for dealing with politics today. It is an amazing achievement to combine so much learning with such lucidity.” (Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism)
“In an age of specialization, we have lost much of the sense of the sweep of the story of Western thinking about politics. In his new book, Alan Ryan has recovered the greatness and deficiencies of that experience. ...Written with an exceptional clarity and presence of voice, Ryan’s book is the best comprehensive statement of the achievements and failures of the Western liberal tradition.” (Tracy B. Strong, UCSD Distinguished Professor, Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego)
“In lucid, precise and accessible prose, Alan Ryan has written an unparalleled guide for our times to the Western tradition of political thought. From Herodotus through the Christian world and the rise of modernity to our own time, readers will be stimulated to reflect on historical, contemporary and perennial questions.” (Steven Lukes, author of Power: A Radical View)
“Alan Ryan’s marvelous survey brings the major thinkers to the table, orchestrating a provocative and enlightening conversation across the centuries that offers fresh and illuminating perspectives on perennial political problems. Scholars and engaged citizens will delight in partaking of Ryan’s intellectual feast.” (Peter Onuf, author of Jefferson’s Empire)
“Magisterial… In more than a thousand pages, Alan Ryan, a longtime Oxford professor who now teaches at Princeton, undertakes to introduce the reader to most of the major political thinkers in Western history…The tensions of modern liberal democratic societies are the intellectual motor of the book… Lively and intellectually engaging… On Politics, like the great works of philosophy it examines, constitutes a powerful brief against the unexamined life.” (Adam Kirsch - New Yorker)
“Monumental… At the heart of the project is a belief that this stuff matters, that the thinkers it revolves around―Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx―remain relevant and fresh… The book is a distillation of [Alan Ryan’s] thinking, both intellectual and practical, and although it can be daunting, the triumph is how, as Ryan takes us through the material, he makes it so much more.” (David Ulin - Los Angeles Times)
“Starting with Herodotus and concluding with current debates over the environment and humanitarian intervention, Alan Ryan covers an extraordinary range of material with fluency and wisdom… As an accessible introduction to the nature of political thought as well as a guide to what is greatest exponents have argued, On Politics could scarcely be bettered. …On Politics is an outstanding and original work.” (Oliver Kamm - Times of London)
About the Author
Alan Ryan was warden of New College, Oxford University, where he was a professor of political theory. He is the author of John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, and On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present.
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Provides excellent context for current political environment
By Stephen Mooney
I have a technical background, but have an interest in history. I found this book much more interesting and understandable than I expected. The book presents the thoughts and arguments of the best Western thinkers of the past 2,500 years. The author first sets each thinker in their historical context, then goes into their major thoughts and conclusions. What made this book rewarding for me is the realization that all modern political questions and arguments have been well thought out with great subtlety over the ages. The consensus agreements have changed greatly, but the questions are not new.
This book has greatly changed my perspective on "current events" in world politics. There are no simple answers in the book, but now I have a fantastic context in which to think about the day to day world politics.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Sublime and Profound!
By Akhilesh Pillalamarri
Other reviewers and numerous magazines and newspapers have given this book the excellent review it deserves. As such, I cannot do much more justice to it in my own review, but would like to touch upon some of the best aspects of this book.
There are some other books that are summaries on Political Thought but none are as good as this one. This book is really a dialogue between the author and the ideas of the thinkers presented within in a considered, nuanced,and subtle fashion. The author speculates on the merits and drawbacks of each of the ideas contained in the book without coming off as too strong or without seeming as though he is propagating one particular world view. The book has a unity to it that would not be possible if it were simply a collection of essays by different authors or even the same author; in short, it is held together by the question, which the author refers to again and again on what is the best way for people to organize themselves politically. Thankfully, the book is not teleological either, which allows various ideas to be considered in and of themselves instead of as points on the way to the present. In short, the book is not polemic. Nor is it overly esoteric (some thinkers such as Leo Strauss have a much more esoteric take on political thought), since it deals with the political organization of humanity, a topic that involves application in the form of practical and organizational questions, though these often derive from theory. In fact, it is interested to see two strands of political thinking highlighted in this book and their interplay with each other- one which derives specifics from a pre-conceived theory (Plato, Hobbes, Marx) and one which sets up some general maxims on the basis of observation (Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville).
This book really contains two volumes. I found some aspects of each of these volumes more interesting than others. The first volume includes the expected- that is, Plato and Aristotle among some other Classical and Medieval thinkers. I would assume that most readers such as myself would have some knowledge of Plato and Aristotle and as such I personally found the sections of Medieval thought to be most interesting because, other than Augustine and Aquinas, much of it was new to me. The second volume was where the author truly shines. Many of the questions and issues posed by thinkers in the period between 1500-1900 are relevant to the present and were instrumental in thinking about how the modern state and political order have developed. I especially enjoyed his sections on Hobbes, counterrevolutionary thinkers (Burke for example), Tocqueville, Mill, Hegel (who is often not discussed through the lens of political theory), and 20th century anxieties and reactions to modernity and social trends. (I wish the author also included some more thinkers in their own chapters instead of talking about them through other chapters; for example, Hume and Kant but as the author himself notes, when undertaking such a large project, it is inevitable that one has to be selective. There is enough food for thought for the seriously thinker to do further research on his/her own).
Finally, this book contains some other strengths. The Economist has put them better than me, so I will quote it a couple of times in order to point out the things that make this book worth buying (copyrighted by the Economist and I claim no authorship):
(1) "Mr Ryan has devoted his life to studying political ideas...and he reminds us that politics is about fundamental philosophical issues rather than just horrible hacks calling each other poopy-heads. How can people run their collective affairs without sacrificing individual rights to collective order? What is the basis of the state's authority over its citizens? Should that authority be absolute or limited by constitutional checks and individual rights?"
(2) "It is also important that, as Mr Ryan puts it, "long-dead writers often speak to us with greater freshness and immediacy than our contemporaries." James Madison has the best advice for Egyptian liberals who want to prevent Muhammad Morsi from turning democracy into dictatorship. John Stuart Mill...has the best arguments against Michael Bloomberg and the "soft despotism" entailed in his soft-drink regulations...Mr Ryan's historical approach helps us at the very least to look at our problems from new angles, and at best to harness the help of history's sharpest minds in producing policies."
(3) "Mr Ryan's approach to political theory is thoroughly old-fashioned--and all the better for it. In recent years historians and political theorists have been busily undermining the Western canon--dissolving the great political theorists in their wider intellectual contexts or discovering seminal thinkers in the rest of the world...Mr Ryan is happy to put the greatness back in. He treats Hobbes and company as thinkers to be grappled with rather than historical figures to be contextualised."
These three quotes demonstrate why this book is such a pleasure to read, because it is deep and thoughtful yet immediate. This is a great book to have as a reference and a reminder especially when one cannot always go back and reread, say, Plato or Hobbes on a daily basis. My background does include Political Theory and I have read most of the thinkers in this book (in college before I got this book) but personally I think this book captures the essence of political thinking in a very informative and readable way. Furthermore, I believe a book like this is useful in providing unity and structure to the cannon of thinkers which if read individually could come across as disparate unless one has a volume such as this and/or a good knowledge of history, especially Western history. Finally,if a person does not have the chance or interest in reading the original works of the thinkers, then this book is a good alternative. This book represents a tradition of Western political thought that reached its highest form in the West over the past 500 years so one should not expect to find much non-Western thought in it, which is fine, since Western political thought evolved in its own manner in conversation among its various texts and thinkers while other civilizations's intellectual thought evolved in their own largely independent ways until recently. To summarize, this is perhaps one of the best books I have ever read, so I recommend it highly.
27 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Superb, engaging, beautifully written
By Nigel Warburton
This is a superb book, engaging and beautifully written. A delight. Few philosophers have the breadth and depth of understanding to make sense of the long history of political philosophy. Alan Ryan is exceptional in combining authority, a light touch, and a contagious enthusiasm for his subject. Highly recommended.
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