In A Very Short Introduction to Politics, Kenneth Minogue begins with a discussion of issues arising from a historical account of politics, and goes on to offer chapters dealing with the Ancient Greeks and the idea of citizenship; Roman law; medieval Christianity and individualism; freedom since Machiavelli and Hobbes; the challenge of ideologies; democracy, oligarchy, and bureaucracy; power and order in modern society; and politics in the West.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam

Kenneth Minogue offers a brilliant and provocative exploration of liberalism in the Western world today: its roots and its influences, its present state, and its prospects in the new century. The Liberal Mind limns the taxonomy of a way of thinking that constitutes the very consciousness of most people in most Western countries.

Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of London.

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was that miserable victims of communist regimes would climb walls, swim rivers, dodge bullets, and find other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time that progressive intellectuals would sentimentally proclaim that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is playing out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from Third World nations pour into Western states, academics and intellectuals present Western life as a nightmare of inequality and oppression.

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere politico-moral posturing about admired ethical causes--from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one's essential decency by having the correct opinions has become a substitute for individual moral responsibility.

Instead, Minogue argues, we ask that our governments carry the burden of solving our social--and especially moral--problems for us. The irony is that the more we allow the state to determine our moral order, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think. Such is the servile mind.

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was the fate of miserable victims of communist regimes who climbed walls, swam rivers, dodged bullets, and found other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time as intellectuals in the West sentimentally proclaimed that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is being played out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from third world nations pour into Western states, the same ivory tower intellectuals assert that Western life is a nightmare of inequality and oppression.

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere politico-moral posturing about admired ethical causes--from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one's essential decency by having the correct opinions has became a substitute for individual moral actions.

Instead, Minogue posits, we ask that our government carry the burden of solving our social--and especially moral--problems for us. The sad and frightening irony is that as we allow the state to determine our moral order and inner convictions, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think.

Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Kenneth Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The fashionable belief that the university is society's handmaiden is confronted by a view of the university as an institution with an independent vitality and function. Minogue at one and the same time reminds us of the sources of admiration for university life in the medieval world, and how it rested squarely on its essential autonomy from the very social pressures that have come to define the modern university.

The Concept of a University traces many confusions imposed by political ideology to a failure to distinguish academic inquiry from other kinds of intellectual activity, such as journalism, religious proselytizing, and high quality propaganda. Minogue holds that where the university lacks a clear sense of the difference between the academic and the pragmatic, its vitality is sapped by conflicting purposes.

Much of the present debate about the crisis in universities rests upon a fundamental error of trying to fit them into some scheme of social functions. Minogue's analysis breaks through much muddled thinking on this subject, presenting instead a coherent, relevant, and stimulating approach to higher education.

In a new introduction, Minogue tells us we have become frightfully tolerant. Anyone can become anything, and we all belong to the one practical world of churning problems and solutions. There is no doubt that a new world is being born. It seems to be a world that will have little place for the disinterested pursuit of truth. A great deal of old fashioned scholarship survives--partly by silence, cunning and exile' --in the universities' of the present day, but little relationship remains between what we used to call universities' and the things called by that name today.

Kenneth Minogue is professor emeritus of political science at the London School of Economics. He was born in New Zealand, educated in Australia, and has made his life and academic career in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Liberal Mind, Nationalism, and most recently, Democracy and the Moral Life. He is a director of the Centre for Policy Studies and also senior research fellow of the Bruges Group, where he remains a member of its academic advisory council.

First published in 1976, Contemporary Political Philosophers is a survey, by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, of the main developments of twentieth-century political philosophy. Few readers will not be surprised and impressed by the richness of the philosophical discussion of politics in this century. This book will be welcomed by the unguided explorer, and for offering a critical discussion which will stimulate those already familiar with the work of these pholosophers.

Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Kenneth Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The fashionable belief that the university is society's handmaiden is confronted by a view of the university as an institution with an independent vitality and function. Minogue at one and the same time reminds us of the sources of admiration for university life in the medieval world, and how it rested squarely on its essential autonomy from the very social pressures that have come to define the modern university.

The Concept of a University traces many confusions imposed by political ideology to a failure to distinguish academic inquiry from other kinds of intellectual activity, such as journalism, religious proselytizing, and high quality propaganda. Minogue holds that where the university lacks a clear sense of the difference between the academic and the pragmatic, its vitality is sapped by conflicting purposes.

Much of the present debate about the crisis in universities rests upon a fundamental error of trying to fit them into some scheme of social functions. Minogue's analysis breaks through much muddled thinking on this subject, presenting instead a coherent, relevant, and stimulating approach to higher education.

In a new introduction, Minogue tells us we have become frightfully tolerant. Anyone can become anything, and we all belong to the one practical world of churning problems and solutions. There is no doubt that a new world is being born. It seems to be a world that will have little place for the disinterested pursuit of truth. A great deal of old fashioned scholarship survives--partly by silence, cunning and exile' --in the universities' of the present day, but little relationship remains between what we used to call universities' and the things called by that name today.

Kenneth Minogue is professor emeritus of political science at the London School of Economics. He was born in New Zealand, educated in Australia, and has made his life and academic career in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Liberal Mind, Nationalism, and most recently, Democracy and the Moral Life. He is a director of the Centre for Policy Studies and also senior research fellow of the Bruges Group, where he remains a member of its academic advisory council.

The term ideology can cover almost any set of ideas, but its power to bewitch political activists results from its strange logic: part philosophy, part science, part spiritual revelation, all tied together in leading to a remarkable paradox--that the modern Western world, beneath its liberal appearance, is actually the most systematically oppressive system of despotism the world has ever seen. Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology takes this complex intellectual construction apart, analyzing its logical, rhetorical, and psychological devices and thus opening it up to critical analysis.

Ideologists assert that our lives are governed by a hidden system. Minogue traces this notion to Karl Marx who taught intellectuals the philosophical, scientific, moral, and religious moves of the ideological game. The believer would find in these ideas an endless source of new liberating discoveries about the meaning of life, and also the grand satisfaction of struggling to overcome oppression. Minogue notes that while the patterns of ideological thought were consistent, there was little agreement on who the oppressor actually was. Marx said it was the bourgeoisie, but others found the oppressor to be males, governments, imperialists, the white race, or the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Ideological excitement created turmoil in the twentieth century, but the defeat of the more violent and vicious ideologies--Nazism after 1945 and Communism after 1989--left the passion for social perfection as vibrant as ever. Activist intellectuals still seek to see through the life we lead. The positive goals of utopia may for the moment have faded, but the ideological hatred of modernity has remained, and much of our intellectual life has degenerated into a muddled and dogmatic skepticism. For Minogue, the complex task of demystifying the demystifiers requires that we should discover how ideology works. It must join together each of its complex strands of thought in order to understand the remarkable power of the whole.

First published in 1976, Contemporary Political Philosophers is a survey, by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, of the main developments of twentieth-century political philosophy. Few readers will not be surprised and impressed by the richness of the philosophical discussion of politics in this century. This book will be welcomed by the unguided explorer, and for offering a critical discussion which will stimulate those already familiar with the work of these philosophers.