After a lifetime of winning and losing at the game of politics,Florentine nobleman Machiavelli set down its ageless rules andmoves in this highly readable treatise. Witty, informative, anddevilishly shrewd, it has long been required reading for everyoneinterested in politics and power.

Book De*ion "A spectre is hauntingEurope - the spectre of Communism." So begins one of history's mostimportant documents, a work of such magnitude that it has foreverchanged not only the scope of world politics, but indeed the courseof human civilization. The Communist Manifesto was written inFriedrich Engels's clear, striking prose and declared theearth-shaking ideas of Karl Marx. Upon publication in 1848, itquickly became the credo of the poor and oppressed who longed for asociety "in which the free development of each is the condition forthe free development of all." The Communist Manifesto contains the seeds of Marx's morecomprehensive philosophy, which continues to inspire influentialeconomic, political, social, and literary theories. But theManifesto is most valuable as an historical document, one that ledto the greatest political upheaveals of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries and to the establishment of the Communistgovernments that until recently ruled half the globe. This Bantam Classic edi

In The Social Contract Rousseau (1712-1778) argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his own. Hence, being free in society requires each of us to subjugate our desires to the interests of all, the general will. Some have seen in this the promise of a free and equal relationship between society and the individual, while others have seen it as nothing less than a blueprint for totalitarianism. The Social Contract is not only one of the great defences of civil society, it is also unflinching in its study of the darker side of political systems.

With an Introduction by Mishtooni Bose More's Utopia is a complex, innovative and penetrating contribution to political thought, cuhninating in the famous 'de*ion' of the Utopians, who live according to the principles of natural law, but are receptive to Christian teachings, who hold all possessions in common,and view golcl as worthless. Drawing on the ideas of Plato,St Augustine and Aristotle, Utopia was to prove seminal in its turn, giving rise to the genres of utopian and dystopian prose fiction whose practitioners include Sir Francis Bacon,H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. At once a critique of the social consequences of greed and a meditation on the personal cost of entering public service,Utopia dramatises the difficulty of balancing the competing claims of idealism and pragmatism, and continues to invite its readers to become participants in a compelling debate concerning the best state of a commonwealth.