White Michael

Unknown to all but a few, Newton was a practicing alchemist who dabbled with the occult, a tortured, obsessive character who searched for an understanding of the universe by whatever means possible. Sympathetic yet balanced, Michael White's Isaac Newton offers a revelatory picture of Newton as a genius who stood at the point in history where magic ended and science began.

Starting with the political philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, through Augustine, Hobbes and Marx, to the recent thought of John Rawls, this is a coherent and comprehensive survey of all the key thinkers and themes. Designed to reflect the structure of political philosophy courses, this accessible book takes a historical approach to cover a wider amount of material, simultaneously offering fresh perspectives on the subject and examining such searching questions as "can one system of thought organize or define collective human behaviour?" and "how do we quantify the relationship between the individual and the wider world?"