The History of Political Philosophy that we offer here gives the reader the possibility to go through, in a fluid but rigorous way, the extraordinary intellectual journey that shapes the canon of Western political theory.
This journey begins in antiquity, with Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, later incorporating the Christian thought of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas; it develops in the Renaissance, with late scholasticism, Machiavelli, Thomas More, Jean Bodin, and Altúsio; discovers new modalities in the Modern period, with Hobbes, Locke, Espinosa, Montesquieu, and Hume, reflecting on the great transformations of the late 18th century through Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, the American Federalists, Burke, Comte or Tocqueville; and definitively enters into contemporaneity with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and Stuart Mill, and through Hegel and Marx, to later rethink, in the 20th century, the shock of totalitarianism and the holocaust, through Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.
The thinkers studied here are, so to speak, our contemporaries. Even when they lived several centuries ago and in social contexts very different from ours, they created the concepts and intellectual schemes with which we think, even today, about our life in politically organized societies. It is through his thinking that we are able to access the deep meaning of our political language, managing to understand terms such as State and Republic, power and authority, justice and the common good, realism and utopia, individual rights and social contract, state of nature and civil status, federalism and pluralism, democracy and general will, liberty and equality, utility and well-being, progress and tradition, social contradiction and class struggle, revolution and reform, totalitarianism and liberalism – and so on.
It is also from these thinkers that we will be able to draw inspiration and resources to reflect, hic et Nunc, with maximum lucidity, on the new challenges that our world is going through, on the uncertainties of the present, and on the possibilities of the future.
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