The European Rupture focuses on the consequences of the end of the Cold War for defence sectors in Europe. It offers a theoretical framework supported by country case studies from both Western Europe and formerly centrally planned econo...
This important series presents critical appraisals of great political thinkers from the Greeks to present day. It focuses in particular on those thinkers who are generally recognized as being central to the evolution and development of ...
Plato of Athens (c 429–347 BC) is the earliest European thinker whose thoughts on politics survive to any great extent. His work, contained in The Republic, the Statesman, the Laws and the unfinished Critias, amongst other works, has ma...
Aristotle (384–322 BC) was born in Northern Greece. He moved to Athens where he associated himself with Plato’s academy. He later became tutor to the young Alexander the Great at the Macedonian court but returned to Athens in 335 to fo...
Born in what is now Algeria, Augustine trained in classical Latin rhetoric and became a professor of rhetoric in Rome. He later studied neo-Platonic philosophy and experienced a conversion to Christianity in 386.
Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) was born in Naples of a powerful Italian family. He took part in the major philosophical and theological controversies of his day and fought the decisive battle which re-admitted the study of the works of Aristo...
The work of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) has a variety of meanings for different interpreters. Some attribute to him a new ''scientific method'' of drawing conclusions from practical or historical experience in order to form rules fo...
Thomas More (1478–1535), English statesman, author and saint, was a lawyer, politician and diplomat, a leading member of the Renaissance of northern Europe and a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. In the history of political thought ...
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the Dutch jurist and philosopher, is a key theorist of the post-mediaeval state. According to Grotius, the state is not subject to any terrestrial superior, either political or ecclesiastical. His political wr...
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is best known for his development of the concept of sovereignty, which was treated most clearly in his great work, Leviathan.
Whilst Hobbes was not the first theorist of sovereignty, he remains perhaps the mos...
John Locke (1632–1704), the English philosopher, has had a wide-ranging influence on modern political thought. Locke’s political philosophy is based on the premise that by nature human beings are equal and that therefore no-one is under ...
The work of David Hume (1711–76), the Scottish historian and philosopher, constitutes a break with the assumptions of his predecessors who ssuggested that our ideas and practices answered to a rational design, whether divine or human. I...
