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.
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 But theManifesto is most valuable as an historical document, one that ledto the greatest political upheaveals of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries and to the establishment of the Communistgovernments that until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
With an Introduction by Rosemary O'Day. London Labour and theLondon Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and socialobservation. It is the classic account of life below the margins inthe greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait ofthe habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour,earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of theGreat Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled.Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixedemployment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, aworld of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personalrelations and fluid families, a world from which regularity isabsent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of thisenvironment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist s eyefor detail, and Henry Mayhew poss????essed all three. No previouswriter had succeeded in presenting the poor through their ownstories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhewrivals his contemporary Dic
