Human beings are restless souls, ever driven by an insistent inner force not only to have more but to be more—to be infinitely more. Various philosophers have emphasized this type of ceaseless striving in their accounts of humanity, as in Spinoza’s notion of conatus and Hobbes’s identification of “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power.” In this book, Laurence Cooper focuses his attention on three giants of the philosophic tradition for whom this inner force was a major preoccupation and something separate from and greater than the desire for self-preservation. Cooper’s overarching purpose is to illuminate the nature of this source of existential longing and discontent and its implications for political life. He concentrates especially on what these thinkers share in their understanding of this psychic power and how they view it ambivalently as the root not only of ambition, vigorous virtue, patriotism, and philosophy, but also of tyranny, imperialism, and varieties of fanaticism. But he is not neglectful of the differences among their interpretations of the phenomenon, either, and especially highlights these in the concluding chapter.

Yves Simon was one of the preeminent Thomistic philosophers and political theorists of the twentieth century. He saw it as a moral duty to understand human reality and to use philosophical analysis to examine contemporary politics when they embodied philosophical errors or vicious ideologies. In The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought, Simon extracts principles from the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France and applies them to Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethopia. As Simon’s analysis shows, the relatively obscure events leading up to the Italian invasion had larger implications for Europe and the world, perhaps even paving the way for Vichy France’s collaboration with Hitler’s German New Order. This book, available for the first time in English, offers an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and pre-emptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate.

With crisp prose and intellectual fairness, Family Politics traces the treatment of the family in the philosophies of leading political thinkers of the modern world. What is family? What is marriage? In an effort to address contemporary society’s disputes over the meanings of these human social institutions, Scott Yenor carefully examines a roster of major and unexpected modern political philosophers—from Locke and Rousseau to Hegel and Marx to Freud and Beauvoir. He lucidly presents how these individuals developed an understanding of family in order to advance their goals of political and social reform. Through this exploration, Yenor unveils the effect of modern liberty on this foundational institution and argues that the quest to pursue individual autonomy has undermined the nature of marriage and jeopardizes its future.

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault’s usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his resistance to using identity as a political category, McLaren argues that Foucault employs a conception of embodied subjectivity that is well-suited for feminism. She applies Foucault’s notion of practices of the self to contemporary feminist practices, such as consciousness-raising and autobiography, and concludes that the connection between self-transformation and social transformation that Foucault theorizes as the connection between subjectivity and institutional and social norms is crucial for contemporary feminist theory and politics.

Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature, Volume 5 in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is the main source of Nightingale’s work on the methodology of social science and her views on social reform. Here we see how she took her “call to service” into practice: by first learning how the laws of God’s world operate, one can then determine how to intervene for good. There is material on medical statistics, the census, pauperism and Poor Law reform, the need for income security measures and better housing, on crime, gender and the family. Her comments on a new edition of The Dialogues of Plato are given, with their impact on the revision of the next edition. We see Nightingale’s condemnation of Plato’s “community of wives,” with her stirring approval of love (even outside marriage!), marriage and the family. In this volume also her views on natural science, education and literature are reported.

Nightingale was an astute behind-the-scenes political activist. Society and Politics publishes (much of it for the first time) her correspondence with such leading political figures as Queen Victoria, W.E. Gladstone and J.S. Mill. There are notes and essays on public administration and personal observations on various members of royalty, prime ministers and ministers, and Indian viceroys. Nightingale’s support of the vote for women (contrary to much in the secondary literature) is here shown. Correspondence and notes on British general elections from 1834 to 1900 is reported, with letters to and for (Liberal) political candidates and fierce condemnations of Conservatives.

Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.

This book represents the first English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1909 dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche’s political and legal philosophy. Before Kazantzakis became one of the best-known modern Greek writers, he was an avid student of Nietzsche’s thought, discovering Nietzsche while studying law in Paris from 1907 to 1909. This powerful assessment of Nietzsche’s radical political thought is translated here from a restored and authentic recent edition of the original. Its deep insights are unencumbered by the encrustations that generations of Nietzsche’s admirers and detractors have deposed on the original Nietzschean corpus. The book also offers a revealing glimpse into the formative stage of Kazantzakis’s thought.

Throughout the history of Western political philosophy, the idea of friendship has occupied a central place in the conversation. It is only in the context of the modern era that friendship has lost its prominence. By retrieving the concept of friendship for philosophical investigation, these essays invite readers to consider how our political principles become manifest in our private lives. They provide a timely corrective to contemporary confusion plaguing this central experience of our public and our private life. This volume assembles essays by well-known scholars who address contemporary concerns about community in the context of philosophical ideas about friendship. Part One includes essays on ancient philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Part Two considers treatments of friendship by Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, and Part Three continues with Thomas Hobbes, Montaigne, the American founders, and de Tocqueville. The volume concludes with two essays that address the postmodern emphasis on fragmentation and the dynamics of power within the modern state.

Global Fragments offers an innovative analysis of globalization that aims to circumvent the sterile dichotomies that either praise or demonize globalization. Eduardo Mendieta applies an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most fundamental experiences of globalization: the mega-urbanization of humanity. The claim that globalization unsettles our epistemic maps of the world is tested against a study of Latin America. Mendieta also recontextualizes the work of three major theorists of globalization—Enrique Dussel, Cornel West, and Jürgen Habermas—to show how their thinking reflects engagement with central problems of globalization and, conversely, how globalization itself is exemplified through the reception of their work. Beyond the epistemic hubris of social theories that seek to accept or reject a globalized world, Mendieta calls for a dialogic cosmopolitanism that departs from the mutuality of teaching and learning in a world that is global but not totalized.