A New History Of Political Philosophy

This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practising politicians and would-be revolutionaries have given to one question: how should human beings best govern themselves?That question raises innumerable others: can we manage our own affairs at all? Should we even try? Many people in the past have thought that only some individuals were either able or entitled to practise self-government: Greeks, but not Persians; men, but not women; the better-off minority, but not the poor majority. Others have thought that few of us have any desire to govern ourselves, and that government is inevitably a matter of a competent elite managing an acquiescent mass.