Political Thought (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) was born as an illegitimate child in the West Indies, orphaned early, and lived less than fifty years, but his accomplishments during that short life are staggering. While an undergraduate at Columbia University, he wrote several pamphlets and articles on the struggle for American independence and eventually served as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. After the Revolution, he was the first delegate chosen to the Constitutional Convention and he wrote the majority of the papers (51 of 85) in The Federalist (1787-1788). In 1789, he became the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. In subsequent years, he participated vigorously in political debates, culminating in the 1804 duel with Aaron Burr in which he lost his life.

James Madison (1751-1836) was not only the fourth President of the United States, he is also regarded as "the Father of the Constitution" and the primary author of the Bill of Rights. In addition to his two-term presidency (1809-1817), he also served as Secretary of State during both presidential terms of Thomas Jefferson. In addition to the aforementioned works, Madison also wrote a third of the essays in The Federalist.

John Jay (1745-1829) wrote five essays in the Federalist, but his place in American history extends far beyond that notable contribution. This Founding Father was the first Chief Justice of the United States, the President of the Continental Congress, a minister (ambassador) to Spain and France, the chief American negotiator in the 1794 treaty with Great Britain, and a major architect of early U.S. foreign policy.

British-born journalist Thomas Paine (1737-1809) did not emigrate to the colonies until 1774, but he was responsible for several widely circulated pamphlets in support of American political revolution: Common Sense (1776), The Crisis (1776-1777) and The Rights of Man (1791-1792). In addition to these works, he also wrote the three-part Age of Reason, a searing Deist indictment of the Bible and church practices (1794, 1795, 1807). Paine's radicalism sometimes put him in personal danger: During the reign of Robespierre, he was imprisoned and narrowly missed execution in France. His anti-clerical views were so unpopular that after his death in New York City, his body was refused a Christian burial.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was an Italian philosopher, diplomat, writer, and political scientist. From 1498 to 1512, he served as Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence. He wrote most prolifically while not in office, his works including essays, dramatic comedies, poetry, and formal personal correspondence.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was the son of a politically active, moderately successful lawyer. Raised in a small town in Prussia, Marx was educated in a private, progressive school before he went to college; first at the University of Bonn; then the University of Berlin; and finally, at the University of Jena, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1841. After graduation, he turned, however, from academia to journalism, contributing to several radical publications of the time, at least four of which were shut down by government censor partly because of his pieces. Among his prolific works are Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (1845) Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Grundrisse (1857), and Das Kapital (1867 and posthumous).

The father of Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a wealthy German cotton manufacturer, but that connection seems to have had little positive influence on his intellectually-inclined son. Like many others of his generation, Friedrich was influenced strongly in his early years the Young Hegelians. To modify his offspring's political views, his father sent him to the British industrial city of Manchester, but his idea backfired: The visit not only strengthened his radical views, it provided him opportunities to meet the two most important socialists in his life, his lifelong mate Mary Burns and Karl Marx, the co-author of the epoch-making Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Indeed, Engels' partnership with Marx continued even after his friend's death: He devoted the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's works, most importantly the second and third volumes of Das Kapital (1885; 1894). Engels' own works include The Peasant War in Germany (1850), Anti-Dühring (1878), and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English statesman, social philosopher, and author. Even while pursuing a political career, he undertook major writing projects, including his ambitious History of King Richard III (1512-1519), which strongly influenced Shakespeare's Richard III. His most important work, however, was his Utopia (1516). His writings against the Reformation won him controversy, but it was only after he was named Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor that he experienced real personal danger. In 1533, he was tried and executed for treason. In 1935, he was canonized as Saint Thomas More by Pope Pius XI.