History of Political Philosophy (original 1963; edition 1987)

Preface to the First Edition -- This book is intended primarily to introduce to undergraduate students of political science to political philosophy. The authors and editors have done their best to take political philosophy seriously, assuming throughout that the teachings of the great political philosophers are important not only historically, as phenomena about which we must learn if we wish to understand societies of the present and the past, but also as phenomena from which we must learn if we wish to understand those societies. We believe that the questions raised by the political philosophers of the past are alive in our own society, if only in the way that questions can be alive which, in the main, are tacitly or unwittingly answered. We have written, further, in the belief that in order to understand any society, to analyze it with any depth, the analyst must himself be exposed to these enduring questions and be swayed by them.