Rights of Man is a classic statement of the belief in humanity's potential to change the world for the better. Published as a reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, it differs from that great work in every relevant respect. Where Burke uses the language of the governing classes, Paine writes with the vigour of a self-taught mast-maker and exciseman. With passionate and rapier wit, Paine challenges Burke's assertion that society cannot be judged by rational standards and found wanting. Rights of Man contains a fully-costed budget, advocating measures such as free education, old age pensions, welfare benefits and child allowance over 100 years before these things were introduced in Britain. It remains a compelling manifesto for social change.

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

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.

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.