The Politics Book

1: Introduction2: Ancient political thought 800BCE - 30CE1: If your desire is for good, the people will be good, Confucius2: The art of war is of vital importance to the state, Sun Tzu3: Plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned, Mozi4: Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils, Plato5: Man is by nature a political animal, Aristotle6: A single wheel does not move, Chanakya7: If evil ministers enjoy safety and profit, this is the beginning of downfall, Han Fei Tzu8: The government is bandied about like a ball, Cicero3: Medieval politics 30CE - 1515CE1: If justice be taken away, what are governments but great bands of robbers? Augustine of Hippo2: Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you, Muhammed3: The people refuse the rule of virtuous men, Al-Farabi4: No free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land, Barons of King John5: For war to be just, there is required a just cause, Thomas Aquinas6: To live politically means living in accordance with good laws, Giles of Rome7: The Church should devote itself to imitating Christ and give up its secular power, Marsilius of Padua8: Government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself, Ibn Khaldun9: A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word, Niccolo Machiavelli4: Rationality and enlightenment 1515 - 17701: In the beginning, everything was common to all, Francisco de Vitoria2: Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, Jean Bodin3: The natural law is the foundation of human law, Francisco Suarez4: Politics is the art of associating men, Johannes Althusius5: Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves, Hugo Grotius6: The condition of man is a condition of war, Thomas Hobbes7: The end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom, John Locke8: When legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, there can be no liberty, Montesquieu9: Independent entrepreneurs make good citizens, Benjamin Franklin5: Revolutionary thoughts 1770 - 18481: To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau2: No generally valid principle of legislation can be based on happiness, Immanuel Kant3: The passions of individuals should be subjected, Edmund Burke4: Rights dependent on property are the most precarious, Thomas Paine5: All men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson6: Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, Johann Gottfried Herder7: Government has but a choice of evils, Jeremy Bentham8: The people have a right to keep and bear arms, James Madison9: The most respectable women are the most oppressed, Mary Wollstonecraft10: The slave feels self-existence to be something external, Georg Hegel11: War is the continuation of Politik by other means, Carl von Clausewitz12: An educated and wise government recognizes the developmental needs of its society, Jose Maria Luis Mora13: A state too extensive in itself ultimately falls into decay, Simon Bolivar14: Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist, John C. Calhoun15: The tendency to attack "the family" is a symptom of social chaos, Auguste Comte6: The rise of the masses 1848 - 19101: Socialism is a new system of serfdom, Alexis de Tocqueville2: Say not I, but we, Giuseppe Mazzini3: That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time, John Stuart Mill4: No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent, Abraham Lincoln5: Property is theft, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon6: The privileged man is a man depraved in intellect and heart, Mikhail Bakunin7: That government is best which governs not at all, Henry David Thoreau8: Communism is the riddle of history solved, Karl Marx9: The men who proclaimed the republic became the assassins of freedom, Alexander Herzen10: We must look for a central axis for our nation, Ito Hirobumi11: The will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche12: It is the myth that is alone important, Georges Sorel13: We have to take working men as they are, Eduard Bernstein14: The disdain of our formidable neighbour is the greatest danger for Latin America, Jose Marti15: It is necessary to dare in order to succeed, Peter Kropotkin16: Either women are to be killed, or women are to have the vote, Emmeline Pankhurst17: It is ridiculous to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, Theodor Herzl18: Nothing will avail to save a nation whose workers have decayed, Beatrice Webb19: Protective legislation in America is shamefully inadequate, Jane Addams20: Land to the tillers! Sun Yat-Sen21: The individual is a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism, Max Weber7: The clash of ideologies 1910 - 19451: Non-violence is the first article of my faith, Mahatma Gandhi2: Politics begin where the masses are, Vladimir Lenin3: The mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability, Rosa Luxemburg4: An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last, Winston Churchill5: The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing, Giovanni Gentile6: The wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence, Joseph Stalin7: If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end? Leon Trotsky8: We will unite Mexicans by giving guarantees to the peasant and the businessman, Emiliano Zapata8: War is a racket, Smedley D. Butler9: Sovereignty is not given, it is taken, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk10: Europe has been left without a moral code, Jose Ortega y Gasset11: We are 400 million people asking for liberty, Marcus Garvey12: India cannot really be free unless separated from the British empire, Manabendra Nath Roy13: Sovereign is he who decides on the exception, Carl Schmitt14: Communism is as bad as imperialism, Jomo Kenyatta15: The state must be conceived of as an "educator", Antonio Gramsci16: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong8: Post-war politics 1945 - present1: The chief evil is unlimited government, Friedrich Hayek2: Parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system, Michael Oakeshott3: The objective of the Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system, Abul Ala Maududi4: There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men, Ayn Rand5: Every known and established fact can be denied, Hannah Arendt6: What is a woman? Simone de Beauvoir7: No natural object is solely a resource, Arne Naess8: We are not anti-white, we are against white supremacy, Nelson Mandela9: Only the weak-minded believe that politics is a place of collaboration, Gianfranco Miglio10: During the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed tend to become oppressors, Paulo Freire11: Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, John Rawls12: Colonialism is violence in its natural state, Frantz Fanon13: The ballot or the bullet, Malcolm X14: We need to "cut off the king's head", Michel Foucault15: Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves, Che Guevara16: Everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy, Noam Chomsky17: Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance, Martin Luther King18: Perestroika unites socialism with democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev19: The intellectuals erroneously fought Islam, Ali Shariati20: The hellishness of war drives us to break with every restraint, Michael Walzer21: No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified, Robert Nozick22: No Islamic law says violate women's rights, Shirin Ebadi23: Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation, Robert Pape9: Directory10: Glossary11: Index12: Acknowledgements... Mehr