Writing well, and persuasively, is not only a discipline that can be learned, it is one deeply rooted in the classical arts of rhetoric and polemic. This book introduces the essential skills, rules, and steps for producing effective political prose appropriate to many contexts, from the editorial, the op-ed, and the polemical essay to others both weighty and seemingly slight.

The eighteenth century produced a remarkable array of thinkers whose influence in the development of free societies and free institutions is incalculable. Among these thinkers were Mandeville, Hutcheson, Smith, Hume, and Burke. And their time is known as the Age of Johnson. Samuel Johnson: Political Writings contains twenty-four of Johnson’s essays on the great social, economic, and political issues of his time. These include “Taxation No Tyranny”—in which Johnson defended the British Crown against the American revolutionaries—and “An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain,” “Thoughts on the Coronation of King George III,” and “The Patriot,” which is one of Johnson’s principal writings during the American Revolution. In his introduction, Donald J. Greene writes, “it may help to understand [Johnson’s] political thinking if we view it in the tradition of what might be called ‘skeptical’ (or ‘radical’ or ‘empirical’) conservatism, the essential feature of which is distrust of grandiose a priori theory and dogma as the basis for political action.” The Liberty Fund edition is a paperback version of Volume 10 in The Yale Johnson.

Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.

Selected Political Writings gathers Stuart Hall's best-known and most important essays that directly engage with political issues. Written between 1957 and 2011 and appearing in publications such as New Left Review and Marxism Today, these twenty essays span the whole of Hall's career, from his early involvement with the New Left, to his critique of Thatcherism, to his later focus on neoliberalism. Whether addressing economic decline and class struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the politics of empire, Hall's singular commentary and theorizations make this volume essential for anyone interested in the politics of the last sixty years.

Alfarabi was among the first to explore the tensions between the philosophy of classical Greece and that of Islam, as well as of religion generally. His writings, extraordinary in their breadth and deep learning, have had a profound impact on Islamic and Jewish philosophy.This volume presents four of Alfarabi's most important texts, making his political thought available to classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and Byzantine and Middle Eastern studies. In a clear prose translation by Charles E. Butterworth, these treatises provide a valuable introduction to the teachings of Alfarabi and to the development of Islamic political philosophy. All of these texts are based on new Arabic editions. Two of the texts—Book of Religion and Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle—appear in English for the first time. The translations of the other two works—Selected Aphorisms and chapter five of the Enumeration of the Sciences—differ markedly from those previously known to English-language readers.Butterworth situates each essay in its historical, literary, and philosophical context. His notes help the reader follow Alfarabi's text and identify persons, places, and events. English-Arabic and Arabic-English glossaries of terms further assist the reader.

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.