A sweeping and nuanced materialist history of Western political
thought In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites
the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating
canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood
examines their ideas not simply in the context of political
languages but as creative responses to the social relations and
conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive
relation between property and state in Western history and shows
how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of
dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among
proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood
argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to
these complex and often contradictory relations. In the first
volume, she traces the development of the Western tradition from
classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective
of social history-a significant departure not only from the
standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual
methods. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle,
Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and
the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of
Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Wood offers a rich,
dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly
stamped our modern world. In the second volume, Wood addresses the
formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the
Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age
of Enlightenment, which have all been attributed to the "early
modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains
controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and
provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history.
The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and
revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and
to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and
background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza,
the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly
explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical
abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social
conflicts of their day.
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