Alan Ryan

On Liberty and The Subjection of Women

A prodigiously brilliant thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age, the political and social radical John Stuart Mill was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century. Regarded as one of the sacred texts of liber

Utilitarianism and Other Essays

Clear, eloquent and profound, Mill's Utilitarianism has had an enormous influence on moral philosophy and is the idea introduction to ethics.Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a reformer who applied the test of utility to the law and politics of his day. Legi

On Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian

Alan Ryan captures both the philosophical complexities and the practical limits of the political thought of Karl Marx, a man whose revolutionary ideas held sway over not just the lives of millions living in Communist countries but also a generation of aca

On Augustine: The Two Cities

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of Augustine the once-hedonistic pagan turned ascetic theologian and defender of the early Christian Church over all the subsequent history of Europe. Augustine s political philosophy is pregnant w

On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present

Both a history and an examination of human thought and behavior spanning three thousand years, On Politics thrillingly traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I and from Hobbes to the present age in Book I