What Governance & Society argues
- When philosophy turns from the soul to the city, it becomes the science of rule — how power is won, justified, distributed, and restrained.
- From Plato's ideal city and Aristotle's constitutions to Kautilya's spycraft and Machiavelli's cold realism — and onward through the rival social contracts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Paine's revolutionary pamphlets, Tocqueville's anatomy of democracy, and Mill's defence of liberty — statecraft swings between the ideal order and the order that actually holds.
Primary works in Governance & Society (13)
- Aristotle — Politics (−350) — Book · read the full text
- Cicero — De Re Publica (On the Commonwealth) (−54) — Book · read the full text
- Cicero — De Legibus (On the Laws) (−52) — Book · read the full text
- Kautilya — Arthashastra (−300) — Book · read the full text
- Machiavelli — The Prince (1532) — Book · read the full text
- Plato — The Republic (−380) — Book · read the full text
- Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (1651) — Book · read the full text
- John Locke — Two Treatises of Government (1689) — Book · read the full text
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract (1762) — Book · read the full text
- Thomas Paine — Common Sense (1776) — Book · read the full text
- Thomas Paine — Rights of Man (1791) — Book · read the full text
- Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America (1835) — Book · read the full text
- John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (1859) — Book · read the full text
Chambers connected to Governance & Society
- Philosophy — Political theory grows out of ethics; Aristotle's Politics is the sequel to his Ethics, and Cicero writes as a Stoic.
- History — Statecraft is tested by the historical record — Machiavelli reads Livy, Polybius theorises the Roman constitution that historians describe.
Reading Trails through Governance & Society
- Foundations of the Just Society Reading Trail — The argument for how we should live together, from philosophy to law.