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.