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After Utopia was the author's first book, a harbinger of her renowned career in political philosophy. Throughout the many changes in political thought during the last half century, this important work has withstood the test of time. The book explores the decline of political philosophy, from Enlightenment optimism to modern cultural despair, and offers a critical, creative analysis of this downward trend. It looks at Romantic and Christian social thought, and shows that while the present political fatalism may be unavoidable, the prophets of despair have failed to explain the world they so dislike, leaving the possibility of a new and vigorous political philosophy. With a foreword examining the book's continued relevance, this current edition introduces a remarkable synthesis of ideas to a new generation of readers.

Since its original publication, this book has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. The book asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? It argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights.

This book traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien régime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. The book's author writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, the author, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. The book presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. It draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyère's maxims. The book is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century.

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment” is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. This book closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, the book carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between “reactive” and “objective” responses to the actions and attitudes of others, the book turns to its central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. The book finds the two common interpretations of this argument, “the simple Humean interpretation” and “the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation” both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, the book concludes that the argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's “social naturalism.” The final chapter defends this naturalistic picture against objections. The book sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. It also features the complete text of Strawson's “Freedom and Resentment.”

What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? This book redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. The book therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, the book argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. It proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher.