The Politics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

INTRODUCTION
ANCIENT POLITICAL THOUGHT 800 BCE–30 CE
	If your desire is for good, the people will be good • Confucius
	The art of war is of vital importance to the state • Sun Tzu
	Plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned • Mozi
	Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils • Plato
	Man is by nature a political animal • Aristotle
	A single wheel does not move • Chanakya
	If evil ministers enjoy safety and profit, this is the beginning of downfall • Han Fei Tzu
	The government is bandied about like a ball • Cicero
MEDIEVAL POLITICS 30 CE–1515 CE
	If justice be taken away, what are governments but great bands of robbers? • Augustine of Hippo
	Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you • Muhammad
	The people refuse the rule of virtuous men • Al-Farabi
	No free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land • Barons of King John
	For war to be just, there is required a just cause • Thomas Aquinas
	To live politically means living in accordance with good laws • Giles of Rome
	The Church should devote itself to imitating Christ and give up its secular power • Marsilius of Padua
	Government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself • Ibn Khaldun
	A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word • Niccolò Machiavelli
RATIONALITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT 1515–1770
	In the beginning, everything was common to all • Francisco de Vitoria
	Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth • Jean Bodin
	The natural law is the foundation of human law • Francisco Suárez
	Politics is the art of associating men • Johannes Althusius
	Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves • Hugo Grotius
	The condition of man is a condition of war • Thomas Hobbes
	The end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom • John Locke
	When legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, there can be no liberty • Montesquieu
	Independent entrepreneurs make good citizens • Benjamin Franklin
REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHTS 1770–1848
	To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
	No generally valid principle of legislation can be based on happiness • Immanuel Kant
	The passions of individuals should be subjected • Edmund Burke
	Rights dependent on property are the most precarious • Thomas Paine
	All men are created equal • Thomas Jefferson
	Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself • Johann Gottfried Herder
	Government has but a choice of evils • Jeremy Bentham
	The people have a right to keep and bear arms • James Madison
	The most respectable women are the most oppressed • Mary Wollstonecraft
	The slave feels self-existence to be something external • Georg Hegel
	War is the continuation of Politik by other means • Carl von Clausewitz
	Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist • John C. Calhoun
	A state too extensive in itself ultimately falls into decay • Simón Bolívar
	An educated and wise government recognizes the developmental needs of its society • José María Luis Mora
	The tendency to attack “the family” is a symptom of social chaos • Auguste Comte
THE RISE OF THE MASSES 1848–1910
	Socialism is a new system of serfdom • Alexis de Tocqueville
	Say not I, but we • Giuseppe Mazzini
	That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time • John Stuart Mill
	No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent • Abraham Lincoln
	Property is theft • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
	The privileged man is a man depraved in intellect and heart • Mikhail Bakunin
	That government is best which governs not at all • Henry David Thoreau
	Communism is the riddle of history solved • Karl Marx
	The men who proclaimed the republic became the assassins of freedom • Alexander Herzen
	We must look for a central axis for our nation • Ito Hirobumi
	The will to power • Friedrich Nietzsche
	It is the myth that is alone important • Georges Sorel
	We have to take working men as they are • Eduard Bernstein
	The disdain of our formidable neighbour is the greatest danger for Latin America • José Martí
	It is necessary to dare in order to succeed • Peter Kropotkin
	Either women are to be killed, or women are to have the vote • Emmeline Pankhurst
	It is ridiculous to deny the existence of a Jewish nation • Theodor Herzl
	Nothing will avail to save a nation whose workers have decayed • Beatrice Webb
	Protective legislation in America is shamefully inadequate • Jane Addams
	Land to the tillers! • Sun Yat-Sen
	The individual is a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism • Max Weber
THE CLASH OF IDEOLOGIES 1910–1945
	Non-violence is the first article of my faith • Mahatma Gandhi
	Politics begin where the masses are • Vladimir Lenin
	The mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability • Rosa Luxemburg
	An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last • Winston Churchill
	The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing • Giovanni Gentile
	The wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence • Joseph Stalin
	If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end? • Leon Trotsky
	We will unite Mexicans by giving guarantees to the peasant and the businessman • Emiliano Zapata
	War is a racket • Smedley D. Butler
	Sovereignty is not given, it is taken • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
	Europe has been left without a moral code • José Ortega y Gasset
	We are 400 million people asking for liberty • Marcus Garvey
	India cannot really be free unless separated from the British empire • Manabendra Nath Roy
	Sovereign is he who decides on the exception • Carl Schmitt
	Communism is as bad as imperialism • Jomo Kenyatta
	The state must be conceived of as an “educator” • Antonio Gramsci
	Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun • Mao Zedong
POST-WAR POLITICS 1945–PRESENT
	The chief evil is unlimited government • Friedrich Hayek
	Parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system • Michael Oakeshott
	The objective of the Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system • Abul Ala Maududi
	There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men • Ayn Rand
	Every known and established fact can be denied • Hannah Arendt
	What is a woman? • Simone de Beauvoir
	No natural object is solely a resource • Arne Naess
	We are not anti-white, we are against white supremacy • Nelson Mandela
	Only the weak-minded believe that politics is a place of collaboration • Gianfranco Miglio
	During the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed tend to become oppressors • Paulo Freire
	Justice is the first virtue of social institutions • John Rawls
	Colonialism is violence in its natural state • Frantz Fanon
	The ballot or the bullet • Malcolm X
	We need to “cut off the king’s head” • Michel Foucault
	Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves • Che Guevara
	Everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy • Noam Chomsky
	Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance • Martin Luther King
	Perestroika unites socialism with democracy • Mikhail Gorbachev
	The intellectuals erroneously fought Islam • Ali Shariati
	The hellishness of war drives us to break with every restraint • Michael Walzer
	No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified • Robert Nozick
	No Islamic law says violate women’s rights • Shirin Ebadi
	Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation • Robert Pape
DIRECTORY
GLOSSARY
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT