Commentary

• The Political Thought of John Locke

  - John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
  This study provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of the meaning of Locke’s political thought. John Dunn restores Locke’s ideas to their exact context, and so stresses the historical question of what Locke in the Two Treatises of Government was… More

• Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century

  - JGA Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
  This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several… More

• Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power

  - Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power, The Free Press, 1989; paperback edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. The Johns Hopkins University Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 1993)
  From the publisher: This survey of Western political thought ranges from Aristotle to “The Federalist Papers”, showing how the doctrine of executive power arose and how it has developed to the present day. Although there were various… More

• The Spirit of Modern Republicanism

  - Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
  The Spirit of Modern Republicanism sets forth a radical reinterpretation of the foundations on which the American regime was constructed. Thomas L. Pangle argues that the Founders had a dramatically new vision of civic virtue, religious faith, and… More

• The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

  - Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
  The leaders of the American Revolution, writes the distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn, were radicals. But their concern was not to correct inequalities of class or income, not to remake the social order, but to “purify a corrupt constitution and… More

• The Machiavellian Moment

  - JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
  Excerpt: “At this point is it appropriate to bring in the name of Locke. In the Two Treatises of Government, published if not written nine or so years before this debate, he had argued that societies formed by the simple occupation and cultivation of… More