Bøker av Steven B. Smith

Offering a new reading of Spinoza's masterpiece, Smith asserts that the 'Ethics' is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project's most powerful defenders and critics-from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin-this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.

Portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States. This title shows the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. It takes us into the contemporary reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory.

Shows that Leo Strauss' defense of liberal democracy was closely connected to his skepticism of both the extreme Left and extreme Right. It assesses Strauss's attempt to direct teaching of political science away from examination of mass behavior and interest-group politics and toward study of philosophical principles on which politics are based.

Who ought to govern? Why should I obey the law? What is the proper education for a citizen and a statesman? These questions probe some of the deepest and most enduring problems that every society confronts, regardless of time and place. This book introduces the wide terrain of political philosophy through the classic texts of the discipline.

Focusing on Spinoza's "Theologico-Political Treatise", this text argues that Spinoza was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism an essential element of modern political thought and declares his work a classic defence of religious toleration and intellectual freedom.