Prophets Unarmed is an authoritative sourcebook on the Chinese Communist Party's main early opposition, the Chinese Trotskyists, who emerged from the Chinese Communist Party, in China and Moscow, in reaction to its 1927 defeat. In spite of being Trotskyism’s main section outside Russia, they were crushed by Stalin in Moscow and by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong in China, thus becoming China’s most persecuted party. Their strategy in the Japan war, when they failed to take up arms, was short-sighted and doctrinaire, and they had scant impact on the revolution. Even so, their association with Chen Duxiu and Wang Shiwei, their attachment to democracy, and their critique of Mao’s bureaucratic socialism brought them a scintilla of recognition after Mao’s death. Their standpoints and proposals and their association with the democratic movement are not without relevance to China's present crisis of morals and authority.

The 2d vol. of the author's trilogy, the 1st of which is The prophet armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921, the 3d of which is The prophet outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940.

On Tyranny is Leo Strauss’s classic reading of Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, or Tyrannicus, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss’s commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and the complete correspondence between the two. This revised and expanded edition introduces important corrections throughout and expands Strauss’s restatement of his position in light of Kojève’s commentary to bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France.

A reissue of the 1975 edition of Strauss' views regarding the nature of political philosophy.

What if there was another Moses, very different from the one we know? According to tradition, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. He is depicted there in a surprising way: with and against God; with and against his people; bringer of the Tablets of the Law, which he breaks; a stuttering prophet, guide to a Promised Land entry to which remains forbidden to him, and dead in an unknown tomb... Highly confusing for those who imagine a Moses carved out of a single block. By way a series of possible portraits - including one of a female Moses - Jean-Christophe Attias follows the metamorphoses of the Hebrew liberator through ages and cultures. Drawing on rabbinical sources as well as the Bible itself, he examines the words of the texts and especially their silences. He discovers here a fragile prophet, teacher of a Judaism of the spirit, of wandering, and of incompleteness. Receive and transmit. Listen, even when the message is confusing. Insistently question, especially when there is no answer. And always, remain free. This seems to be the Judaism of Moses. A Judaism that speaks to believers and others - to Jews, of course, but also far beyond them, inviting its hearers to have done with tribal pride, the violence of weapons, and the tyranny of a special place.

"All political action has . . . in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good. If this directedness becomes explicit, if men make it their explicit goal to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society, political philosophy emerges. . . . The theme of political philosophy is mankind's great objectives, freedom and government or empire—objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves. Political philosophy is that branch of philosophy which is closest to political life, to non-philosophic life, to human life."—From "What Is Political Philosophy?" What Is Political Philosophy?—a collection of ten essays and lectures and sixteen book reviews written between 1943 and 1957—contains some of Leo Strauss's most famous writings and some of his most explicit statements of the themes that made him famous. The title essay records Strauss's sole extended articulation of the meaning of political philosophy itself. Other essays discuss the relation of political philosophy to history, give an account of the political philosophy of the non-Christian Middle Ages and of classic European modernity, and present his theory of esoteric writing.