On Politics
Alan Ryan
thg 11 2012 · Penguin UK
3,7star
3 bài đánh giáreport
Sách điện tử
1152
Trang
family_home
Đủ điều kiện
info
reportĐiểm xếp hạng và bài đánh giá chưa được xác minh Tìm hiểu thêm
Giới thiệu về sách điện tử này
This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practising politicians and would-be revolutionaries have given to one question:how should human beings best govern themselves? That question raises innumerable others: can we manage our own affairs at all? Should we even try? Many people in the past have thought that only some individuals were either able or entitled to practise self-government: Greeks, but not Persians; men, but not women; the better-off minority, but not the poor majority. Others have thought that few of us have any desire to govern ourselves, and that government is inevitably a matter of a competent elite managing an acquiescent mass.
Then, what do we mean by 'freedom' today, and is it the same freedom that people enjoyed, or strove for, in the past? Almost every modern government claims to be democratic; but is democracy really the best way of organising our political life? For almost two thousand years, educated opinion said not. Today, educated opinion says yes. In the modern west, do we actually live in democracies? They certainly do not resemble what the Athenians fought and died to preserve. It seems that there may be less agreement than we might think about how human beings can best govern themselves.
In this extraordinary book, more that thirty years in the making, Alan Ryan engages with the great thinkers of the past to explain their ideas with a lucidity which makes the book compelling reading. While acknowledging how much separates us from our intellectual forebears, he reminds us how often the ideas of long-dead or distant thinkers are more alive, and speak to us more vividly and immediately, than those of our contemporaries. At a time when we sometimes feel that the problems of the globe will simply overwhelm our ability to control them, he provides a peerless guide to the ways in which the problems of politics have been thought about by the greatest minds of our civilization.
Then, what do we mean by 'freedom' today, and is it the same freedom that people enjoyed, or strove for, in the past? Almost every modern government claims to be democratic; but is democracy really the best way of organising our political life? For almost two thousand years, educated opinion said not. Today, educated opinion says yes. In the modern west, do we actually live in democracies? They certainly do not resemble what the Athenians fought and died to preserve. It seems that there may be less agreement than we might think about how human beings can best govern themselves.
In this extraordinary book, more that thirty years in the making, Alan Ryan engages with the great thinkers of the past to explain their ideas with a lucidity which makes the book compelling reading. While acknowledging how much separates us from our intellectual forebears, he reminds us how often the ideas of long-dead or distant thinkers are more alive, and speak to us more vividly and immediately, than those of our contemporaries. At a time when we sometimes feel that the problems of the globe will simply overwhelm our ability to control them, he provides a peerless guide to the ways in which the problems of politics have been thought about by the greatest minds of our civilization.
Xếp hạng và đánh giá
3,7
3 bài đánh giá
Giới thiệu tác giả
ALAN RYAN was born in London in 1940 and taught for many years at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of New College and Reader in Politics. He was Professor of Politics at Princeton from 1988 to 1996, when he returned to Oxford to become Warden of New College and Professor of Political Theory until his retirement in 2009. His previous books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Xếp hạng sách điện tử này
Cho chúng tôi biết suy nghĩ của bạn.
Đọc thông tin
Điện thoại thông minh và máy tính bảng
Cài đặt ứng dụng Google Play Sách cho Android và iPad/iPhone. Ứng dụng sẽ tự động đồng bộ hóa với tài khoản của bạn và cho phép bạn đọc trực tuyến hoặc ngoại tuyến dù cho bạn ở đâu.
Máy tính xách tay và máy tính
Bạn có thể nghe các sách nói đã mua trên Google Play thông qua trình duyệt web trên máy tính.
Thiết bị đọc sách điện tử và các thiết bị khác
Để đọc trên thiết bị e-ink như máy đọc sách điện tử Kobo, bạn sẽ cần tải tệp xuống và chuyển tệp đó sang thiết bị của mình. Hãy làm theo hướng dẫn chi tiết trong Trung tâm trợ giúp để chuyển tệp sang máy đọc sách điện tử được hỗ trợ.
