This was the reader for a Political Science course I took--required for the major--on Ideology. My professor was one of the co-editors of the book, Nicole Fermon. She was one of my favorite professors, despite the fact that we were political opposites--she a self-declared "Trotskyite" and myself an avowed libertarian. I think I can see one of the reasons I loved her just in the diversity of the chosen texts. Yes, as one reviewer notes, it's lacking non-Western thought. You'll find Plato and Aristotle here, but not Confucius or Laozi--or Mao.

But you'll find excerpts of just about every seminal Western thinker--and on all sides of the spectrum (and it doesn't neglect women thinkers.) So you will find Rousseau and Marx and Lenin and Goldman and Fanon and Malcolm X and Rawls and Foucault--darlings of the left. But you'll also find the thinkers important to libertarians and conservatives: Locke, Smith, Publius (pen name for Madison, Hamilton and Jay in the Federalist Papers), Burke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Tocqueville, Arendt, Orwell, Nozick. So beyond the classroom I recommend it for a grounding in political ideologies in Western culture. ( )

A standard text. Good of its kind, but notably lacking non-Western thought. ( )