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Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought is firmly established as the major student series of texts in political theory. It aims to make available all the most important texts in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the twentieth century, from throughout the world and from every political tradition. All the familiar classic texts are included, but the series seeks at the same time to enlarge the conventional canon through a global scope and by incorporating an extensive range of less well-known works and previously marginalised voices, many of them never before available in a modern English edition. Where possible, the texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. However, where appropriate, abridged or tightly focused and thematic collections are offered instead. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with chronologies, biographical sketches, a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. Overall, the series aims to provide the reader with an outline of the entire evolution of political thinking on a global scale.

  • General Editors: Quentin Skinner, Queen Mary University of London
  • Editorial Boards: Michael Cook, Princeton University, New Jersey, Hannah Dawson, King’s College London, Adom Getachew, University of Chicago, Emma Hunter, University of Edinburgh, Gabriel Paquette, University of Oregon, Andrew Sartori, New York University, Hilde de Weerdt, Universiteit Leiden

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118 results in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought

Page 1 of 6

Ibn Khaldūn: Political Thought
  • Ibn Khaldun
  • Edited by Gabriel Martinez-Gros
  • Translated by Anna Bailey Galietti
  • Published online:
    14 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Ibn Khaldūn is one of the outstanding thinkers about the nature of society and politics in the pre-modern Arab world. This volume presents the political writings of the fourteenth-century philosopher, stressing their enduring relevance. Arnold Toynbee used to say that Ibn Khaldūn's work was the most impressive endeavour to build a theory out of history ever undertaken before the nineteenth century. However, translators and historians discovered Ibn Khaldūn at the time when new revolutionary economic and political conditions were dismissive of his philosophy. In this edition, Gabriel Martinez-Gros brings Ibn Khaldūn's political thought to the forefront, exploring his theories in the context of his era, but also emphasizing their profound resonances with modern society. Far from the caricature of Ibn Khaldūn as a 'tribal philosopher', Martinez-Gros shows that Ibn Khaldūn's thought is about creating wealth in an agrarian society, concerned with economic concepts, demography, war and violence.

Bartolus of Sassoferrato
  • Three Tracts on City Government and Related Writings
  • Bartolus of Sassoferrato
  • Edited and translated by George Garnett, Magnus Ryan
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • The medieval jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato (d. 1357) has long been accorded seminal importance by historians of political thought. This volume provides the first complete English translation of his three most celebrated tracts: On Guelfs and Ghibellines, On the Government of a City, and On the Tyrant, which constituted the first consolidated response by a medieval lawyer to the problem of tyranny in the city republics of central and northern Italy. Crucial sections of Bartolus' academic commentaries on Roman law are also translated in an appendix. George Garnett and Magnus Ryan make the writings of Bartolus accessible to an expanded audience, situating his political theory in its original context and explaining his arguments. Footnotes to the translation explain all Bartolus' references to normative sources, legal and otherwise, and a detailed glossary of legal terms and institutions is provided. This translation allows readers to understand how Bartolus mobilised the Roman and canon laws to address immediate political developments, and why he was the most famous and enduringly influential medieval lawyer.

Volney: ‘The Ruins' and ‘Catechism of Natural Law'
  • Constantin Volney
  • Edited and translated by Colin Kidd
  • Translated by Lucy Kidd
  • Published online:
    08 February 2024
    Print publication:
    15 February 2024
  • Volney was once as influential as Tom Paine, and the author of one of the most popular works of the French Revolutionary era. The Ruins of Empires makes an argument for popular sovereignty, couched in the alluring and accessible form of an Oriental dream-tale. A favourite of both Thomas Jefferson, who translated it, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the Ruins advances a scheme of radical, utopian politics premised upon the deconstruction of all the world's religions. It was widely celebrated by radicals in Britain and America, and exercised an enormous influence on poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Walt Whitman for its indictments of tyranny and priestcraft. Volney instead advocates a return to natural precepts shorn of superstition, set out in his sequel, the Catechism of Natural Law. These days Volney enjoys a high profile in African-American Studies as a proponent of Black Egyptianism.

Caliphate and Imamate
  • An Anthology of Medieval Muslim Texts on Political Theology
  • Edited by Hassan Ansari, Nebil Husayn
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • One of the most enduring sources of conflict among Muslims is the question of power and authority after the Prophet Muhammad. This anthology of classical Arabic texts, presented in a new English translation, offers a comprehensive overview of the early history of the caliphate and key questions that medieval Muslim scholars discussed in their works on the subject. Composed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, these texts succinctly present competing views on the prerequisites of legitimate leadership and authority in the Islamic tradition. This volume offers an engaging introduction to the diverse writings of influential scholars representing six classical Islamic schools of theology: Sunnism, Zaydism, Twelver Shiʿism, Muʿtazilism, Ibadism, and Ismaʿilism.

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings
  • Catharine Macaulay
  • Edited by Max Skjönsberg
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • The writings of republican historian and political pamphleteer Catharine Macaulay (1731–91) played a central role in debates about political reform in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. A critical reader of Hume's bestselling History of England, she broke new ground in historiography by defending the regicide of Charles I and became an inspiration for many luminaries of the American and French revolutions. While her historical and political works engaged with thinkers from Hobbes and Locke to Bolingbroke and Burke, she also wrote about religion, philosophy, education and animal rights. Influencing Wollstonecraft and proto-feminism, she argued that there were no moral differences between men and women and that boys and girls should receive the same education. This book is the first scholarly edition of Catharine Macaulay's published writings and includes all her known pamphlets along with extensive selections from her longer historical and political works.

Albert Venn Dicey: Writings on Democracy and the Referendum
  • Edited by Gregory Conti
  • Albert Venn Dicey
  • Published online:
    10 February 2023
    Print publication:
    16 February 2023
  • What are the limits to parliamentary sovereignty? When should the people be able to vote directly on issues? The constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) was a cogent advocate of the referendum. While his enthusiasm for the institution was widely acknowledged in his own day, thereafter this dimension of his career has been largely neglected. This fall into obscurity is partly explained by the fact that Dicey never collected his writings on referendums into a single volume. Consequently, during the prolonged crisis over Brexit, the implications of Dicey's thought were unclear, despite his standing as a foundational figure in British constitutional law. This timely modern edition brings together Dicey's sophisticated and intricate writings on the referendum, and it covers his attempts to construct a credible theory of democracy on a new intellectual and institutional basis. An original scholarly introduction analyzes Dicey's thought in light of its contemporary context.

Medieval Muslim Mirrors for Princes
  • An Anthology of Arabic, Persian and Turkish Political Advice
  • Edited and translated by Louise Marlow
  • Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • The 'mirror for princes' genre of literature offers advice to a ruler, or ruler-to-be, concerning the exercise of royal power and the wellbeing of the body politic. This anthology presents selections from the 'mirror literature' produced in the Islamic Early Middle Period (roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries CE), newly translated from the original Arabic and Persian, as well as a previously translated Turkish example. In these texts, authors advise on a host of political issues which remain compelling to our contemporary world: political legitimacy and the ruler's responsibilities, the limits of the ruler's power and the limits of the subjects' duty of obedience, the maintenance of social stability, causes of unrest, licit and illicit uses of force, the functions of governmental offices and the status and rights of diverse social groups. Medieval Muslim Mirrors for Princes is a unique introduction to this important body of literature, showing how these texts reflect and respond to the circumstances and conditions of their era, and of ours.

W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought
  • W. E. B. Du Bois
  • Edited by Adom Getachew, Jennifer Pitts
  • Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speeches on international themes, spanning the years 1900-1956. These key texts reveal Du Bois's distinctive approach to the problem of empire and demonstrate his continued importance in our current global context. The volume charts the development of Du Bois's anti-imperial thought, drawing attention to his persistent concern with the relationship between democracy and empire and illustrating the divergent inflections of this theme in the context of a shifting geopolitical terrain; unprecedented political crises, especially during the two world wars; and new opportunities for transnational solidarity. With a critical introduction and extensive editorial notes, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought conveys both the coherence and continuity of Du Bois's international thought across his long life and the tremendous range and variety of his preoccupations, intellectual sources, and interlocutors.

The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution
  • Edited by Richard Bourke, Niamh Gallagher
  • Published online:
    21 April 2022
    Print publication:
    05 May 2022
  • The Irish Revolution was a pivotal moment of transition for Ireland, the United Kingdom, and British Empire. A constitutional crisis that crystallised in 1912 electrified opinion in Ireland whilst dividing politics at Westminster. Instead of settling these differences, the advent of the First World War led to the emergence of new antagonisms. Republican insurrection was followed by a struggle for independence along with the partition of the island. This volume assembles some of the key contributions to the intellectual debates that took place in the midst of these changes and displays the vital ideas developed by the men and women who made the Irish Revolution, as well as those who opposed it. Through these fundamental texts, we see Irish experiences in comparative European and international contexts, and how the revolution challenged the durability of Britain as a global power.

Political Thought in Portugal and its Empire, c.1500–1800
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Pedro Cardim, Nuno Goncalo Monteiro
  • Published online:
    08 October 2021
    Print publication:
    21 October 2021
  • Showcasing texts by Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian authors, this volume demonstrates the wealth of the political thought of early modern Portugal and its empire. Gathering together important texts on social order, government, and politics by authors who made a significant contribution to the development of early modern Portugal, it demonstrates that Portugal was the setting for vibrant political debate, often shaped by, and emerging in response to, very particular assumptions, circumstances, and concerns. Combining a chronological approach with in-depth thematic sections, the book explores how some controversies that took place in Portugal centred on themes similar to those in other European countries, while others were linked to the specific nature and history of the Portuguese monarchy and its interactions with other polities. It thus offers an overview of the main debates on politics and government and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted history of European political ideas.

The Essentials of Governance
  • Wu Jing
  • Edited and translated by Hilde De Weerdt, Glen Dudbridge, Gabe van Beijeren
  • Published online:
    12 January 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • In the eighth century, Wu Jing selected exchanges between Emperor Taizong and his ministers that he deemed key to good governance. This collection of dialogues has been used for the education of emperors, political elites and general readers ever since, and is a standard reference work in East Asian political thought. Consisting of ten volumes, subdivided into forty topics, The Essentials of Governance addresses core themes of Chinese thinking about the politics of power, from the body politic, presenting and receiving criticism, recruitment, the education of the imperial clan, political virtues and vices, to cultural policy, agriculture, law, taxation, border policy, and how to avoid disaster and dynastic fall. Presented with introductory commentary that offers insights into its historical context and global reception, this accessible and reliable translation brings together ten scholars of Chinese intellectual history to offer a nuanced edition that preserves the organisation, tone and flow of the original.

William Penn: Political Writings
  • Edited by Andrew R. Murphy
  • Published online:
    05 December 2020
    Print publication:
    10 December 2020
  • William Penn (1644-1718) – Quaker activist, theorist of liberty of conscience, and colonial founder and proprietor – played a central role in the movement for religious liberty on both sides of the Atlantic for more than four decades. This volume presents, for the first time, a fully annotated scholarly edition of Penn's political writings over the course of his long public career, tracing his thinking from his early theorisation of religious toleration and liberty of conscience in England, as a leading member of the Society of Friends during the 1670s, to his colonial undertaking in Pennsylvania a decade later, his controversial role in the years leading up to the 1688 Revolution, and the ongoing consequences of that Revolution to his future prospects. Penn's political writings provide an illuminating window into the increasingly sophisticated and influential movement for liberty of conscience in the early modern world.

Kumazawa Banzan: Governing the Realm and Bringing Peace to All below Heaven
  • Kumazawa Banzan
  • Edited and translated by John A. Tucker
  • Published online:
    05 December 2020
    Print publication:
    26 November 2020
  • Kumazawa Banzan's (1619-1691) Responding to the Great Learning (Daigaku wakumon) stands as the first major writing on political economy in early modern Japanese history. John A. Tucker's translation is the first English rendition of this controversial text to be published in eighty years. The introduction offers an accessible and incisive commentary, including detailed analyses of Banzan's text within the context of his life, as well as broader historical and intellectual developments in East Asian Confucian thought. Emphasizing parallels between Banzan's life events, such as his relief efforts in the Okayama domain following devastating flooding, and his later writings advocating compassionate government, environmental initiatives, and projects for growing wealth, Tucker sheds light on Banzan's main objective of 'governing the realm and bringing peace and prosperity to all below heaven'. In Responding to the Great Learning, Banzan was doing more than writing a philosophical commentary, he was advising the Tokugawa shogunate to undertake a major reorganization of the polity - or face the consequences.

Machiavelli: The Prince
  • 2nd edition
  • Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Edited by Quentin Skinner, Russell Price
  • Published online:
    14 July 2020
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • This new edition of the acclaimed translation of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince - revised for the first time after thirty years - includes a rewritten and extended introduction by Quentin Skinner. Niccolò Machiavelli is arguably the most famous and controversial figure in the history of political thought. The Prince remains his best-known work, and throws down a challenge that subsequent writers on statecraft and political morality have found impossible to ignore. Quentin Skinner's introduction offers a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text both as a response to the world of Florentine politics and as a critical engagement with the classical and Renaissance genre of advice-books for princes. This new edition also features an improved timeline of key events in Machiavelli's life, helping the reader place the work in the context of its time, in addition to an enlarged and fully updated bibliography.

Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings
  • 2nd edition
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Edited by Victor Gourevitch
  • Published online:
    26 June 2020
    Print publication:
    08 November 2018
  • A comprehensive and authoritative anthology of Rousseau's important early political writings in faithful English translations. This volume includes the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men - the so-called First and Second Discourses - together with Rousseau's extensive Replies to critics of these Discourses; the Essay on the Origin of Languages; the Letter to Voltaire on Providence; as well as several minor but illuminating writings - the Discourse on Heroic Virtue and the essay Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book. In these as well as in his later writings, Rousseau probes the very premises of modern thought. His influence was wide-reaching from the very first, and it has continued to grow since his death. The American and the French Revolutions were profoundly affected by his thought, as were Romanticism and Idealism. This new edition features up-to-date translations, an expanded introduction, and an extensive editorial apparatus designed to assist students at every level access these seminal texts.

Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law
  • Samuel Pufendorf
  • Edited by James Tully
  • Translated by Michael Silverthorne
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    26 July 1991
  • On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673) is Pufendorf's succinct and condensed presentation of the natural law political theory he developed in his monumental classic On the Law of Nature and Nations (1672). His theory was the most influential natural law philosophy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. He advanced a compelling reply to Grotius and Hobbes, and in doing so, set the intellectual problems for theorists such as Locke, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, and Smith. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, Pufendorf sets forth a classic justification of the early modern enlightened state and of the proper relations of moral and political subjection to it. This lucid and historically sensitive translation by Michael Silverthorne, (a classicist and a specialist in Roman Law and early modern political thought) is the first since the early twentieth century. James Tully's introduction sets the text in its seventeenth-century context, summarises the main arguments, surveys recent literature on Pufendorf, and shows how Pufendorf transformed natural law theory into an independent discipline of juristic political philosophy which dominated reflection on politics until Kant.

Cicero: On the Commonwealth and On the Laws
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited and translated by James E. G. Zetzel
  • Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    27 May 2017
  • Cicero's On the Commonwealth and On the Laws were his first and most substantial attempts to adapt Greek theories of political life to the circumstances of the Roman Republic. They represent Cicero's understanding of government and remain his most important works of political philosophy. On the Commonwealth survives only in part, and On the Laws was never completed. The new edition of this volume has been revised throughout to take account of recent scholarship, and features a new introduction, a new bibliography, a chronological table and a biographical index. James E. G. Zetzel offers a scholarly reconstruction of the fragments of On the Commonwealth and a masterly translation of both dialogues. The texts are further supported by notes and synopsis, designed to assist students in politics, philosophy, ancient history, law and classics.

Guicciardini: Dialogue on the Government of Florence
  • Francesco Guicciardini
  • Edited by Alison Brown
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    09 June 1994
  • This is the first translation into English of Guicciardini's Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Written in the early 1520s by the author of the famous History of Italy, as well as a History of Florence and Political Maxims and Reflections, this dialogue presents what is arguably the most searching and comprehensive analysis of the politics of his times. Like Machiavelli, his contemporary and friend, Guicciardini rejects classical republican arguments in the name of the new political realism and acknowledges the important role of patronage and graft in contemporary politics and the illegitimacy of nearly all forms of political power. In this Dialogue he provides one of the clearest expositions of the term 'reason of state', which he was one of the first to employ and which he uses to justify the priority of state interest over private morality and religion.

Paine: Political Writings
  • 2nd edition
  • Thomas Paine
  • Edited by Bruce Kuklick
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    13 April 2000
  • Thomas Paine was arguably the single most influential political writer in the English-speaking world during the great upheavals of the American and French Revolutions. His writings here reappear in the acclaimed Cambridge Texts series. For this revised and updated edition the distinguished intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick brings together an expanded collection of the classic Paine texts - Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason - as well as the first of Paine's papers on The Crisis of 1776. A brief chronology, updated notes for further reading, and a succinct and lucid introduction to the principal themes of each text offer further support to the student reader. This selection will appeal to students in a variety of disciplines from political theory to American history, and enable further generations to engage at first hand with one of the most gifted and popular expositors of radical ideas ever to generate mass support.

Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings
  • Margaret Cavendish
  • Edited by Susan James
  • Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    28 August 2003
  • Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a wide variety of works including poems, plays, letters and treatises of natural philosophy, but her significance as a political writer has only recently been recognised. This major contribution to the series of Cambridge Texts includes the first ever modern edition of her Divers Orations on English social and political life, together with a new student-friendly rendition of her imaginary voyage, A New World called the Blazing World. Susan James explains the allusions made in this classic text, and directs readers to the many intellectual debates with which Cavendish engages. Together these two works reveal the character and scope of Margaret Cavendish's political thought. She emerges as a singular and probing writer, who simultaneously upholds a conservative social and political order and destabilises it through her critical and unresolved observations about natural philosophy, scientific institutions, religion, and the relations between men and women.

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