Series: Classic Thinkers

Almost everyone has heard of Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics and author of Wealth of Nations. There is, however, much more to him than this. This new introduction gives a crystal clear overview of the entirety of Smith’s thought. It demonstrates how Smith’s economic theories fit into a larger system of thought that encompasses moral philosophy, philosophy of...

Famous as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft was a wide-ranging and controversial moral and political philosopher. She engaged with many of the most polarising issues of her day: criticising social hierarchies, advocating for educational reform, analysing the French Revolution, and challenging men’s political dominance. In this illuminating introduction, Alan Coffee argues that the...

Jeremy Bentham – philosopher, theorist of law and of the art of government – was among the most influential figures of the early nineteenth century, and the approach he pioneered – utilitarianism – remains central to the modern world. In this new introduction to his ideas, Michael Quinn shows how Bentham sought to be an engineer or architect of choices...

The most famous of all medieval Jewish thinkers, Moses Maimonides is known for his monumental contributions to Jewish law, theology, and medicine, and for an influence that extends into the wider world. His remarkable work, The Guide for the Perplexed, is notoriously difficult to interpret, since Maimonides aimed it at those already versed in both philosophy and the rabbinic tradition...

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as a defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke’s arguments in relation to...