Product Description: This presentation discusses two political documents that have changed history: Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx argues that history flows inevitably toward a social revolution, which will result in a society without economic classes...read more

Product Description: Machiavelli wrote The Prince for his ruler as a guide for gaining and keeping power. Central themes of his essay are the relation between politics and ethics, what the best form of government consists of; the importance of the Church, and the growth of Italy as a nation-state...read more

Product Description: Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, captured the essence of nineteenth-century America in his penetrating work, Democracy in America. The democratic concept of equality was emerging as a political reality in America, and it threatened the aristocracy of Europe; it produced a society of individualists hungry for self improvement...read more

Presents the political thoughts of Thomas Hobbes, including an examination of the political and social environment in England in 1651.

Product Description: This presentation examines two eloquent arguments for human liberty: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In On Liberty, the great philosopher John Stuart Mill rigorously defends individual liberty based on the concept of utilitarianism, or “the greatest happiness for the greatest number...read more

Amazon.com Review: These four tapes provide an accessible yet detailed guide to three of America's formative political documents. All of the material can be understood and appreciated by an intelligent grade-schooler, and no one will fail to come away from the listening better informed about the history and the intellectual and conceptual underpinnings of the American republic...read more