Comparing political thinkers / edited by Ross Fitzgerald

Comparing Political Thinkers is a collection of fifteen original essays,
written independently of each other, by political theorists from the
English-speaking world. A primary aim of the book is to compare
arguments advanced by different political thinkers - some ancient, some
modern, some Eastern, some from the West. The list of thinkers dealt
with is as follows: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius,
Augustine, Hobbes, More, Marsilius, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau,
Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Calvin, Kropotkin, Mill, Herbert
Marcuse, Christian Bay, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Thus this
collection contrasts thinkers not only often across time, but also between
very different social and cultural contexts. Some pairs of thinkers (such
as Socrates and Plato) come from the same place and from very similar
times; others (such as Plato and Confucius, Aristotle and Mencius) from
roughly the same times, but from very different places and social
environments. Others yet again (for example, Hobbes and St Augustine)
come from very different times, places and environments. Despite the
inevitable omission of key thinkers (names like Jeremy Bentham,
Edmund Burke, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung readily come to mind) and
despite the fact that essays of this length must, of necessity, simplify and
compress often very subtle arguments, the student embarking on the
study of political thought will be given a taste of seminal political ideas
and also of the intriguing activity of comparing political arguments
advanced by different thinkers. Such an activity raises very interesting
and complex methodological problems, about comparison, which are
dealt with by some of the contributors, especially focusing on the
problem of thinkers employing a very different political vocabulary and
language.