Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech. In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'assays', inspired by the ideas he found in books contained in his (...) library and from his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. But, above all, Montaigne studied himself as a way of drawing out his own inner nature and that of men and women in general. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature and provide an engaging insight into a wise Renaissance mind, continuing to give pleasure and enlightenment to modern readers. With its extensive introduction and notes, M.A. Screech's edition of Montaigne is widely regarded as the most distinguished of recent times. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1586) studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection. If you enjoyed The Complete Essays, you might like Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Screech's fine version... must surely serve as the definitive English Montaigne' A.C. Grayling, Financial Times 'A superb edition' Nicholas Wollaston, Observer. (shrink)

Since Dilthey’s template study of 1890, the Prussian state’s attempt to censor Kant’s religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This paper offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a longstanding Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship (...) Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytising and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true ‘religion of reason’, the religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytising, leading eventually to government’s attempt to censor Kant’s own ‘pure religion of reason’. (shrink)

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh, nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account shows how principles and agency really can interact.

Consisting of two essays, this work by a Harvard professor offers his thoughts on the idea of a social contract regulating people's behavior toward one another.

Our contact with men of distant lands has made possible the notion of universal history. All societies are members of the same human civilization, though at different stages in its development. From the small sum of known past events the universal historian selects only those whose influence on contemporary life has been essential and readily discernible, and moves backward in time toward the origins. This produces an aggregate of world-changes which fit together only in a disconnected and fortuitous way. But (...) his philosophical understanding transforms the aggregate into a coherent whole: the unity of the laws of physical and human nature allows him to infer backward to phenomena which had been left hidden or unrecorded. The universal historian transplants his reasoned harmony into the nature of things, a teleological principle into the course of world history. This elevates our every deed to immortality in the progression toward human perfectibility. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. (...) These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices.Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity. (shrink)

Examines political philosophies of the classic theorists as a means to understand international dilemmas in the post-Cold War world.

This paper offers an imminent interpretation of Kant's political teleology in the context of his response to Moses Mendelssohn in Theory and Practice III concerning prospects of humankind's moral progress. The paper assesses the nature of Kant's response against his mature political philosophy in the Doctrine of Right . In `Theory and Practice III' Kant's response to Mendelssohn remains incomplete: whilst insisting that individuals have a duty to contribute towards humankind's moral progress, Kant has no conclusive answer as to how (...) individuals might act on that duty. `Theory and Practice III' lacks a clear conception of the distinctness of political morality from the domain of virtue; Kant's resort to teleological argumentation is indicative of his lack of an account of instituting Right. The latter can be found in the Doctrine of Right —yet Kant's earlier teleological arguments contribute crucially to the development of his mature morality of Right. Key Words: inborn duty • moral progress • political teleology • principles of Right. (shrink)