Political Ideologies: A Reader and Guide 1st Edition

I like to read selections from political thinkers. My college had us read too much about original source documents. I ordered from U.K. at a discounted rate used excellent. Shipping was a few weeks but worth it

An up-to-date, definitive, and thorough textbook of major political ideologies. Each ideology is presented and discussed, with its historical origins, evolution, and contemporary forms detailed, along with the roles of the individual actors who shaped the ideology.Then excerpts from the original writings of those actors are presented, so that you can read their actual words. This book served as a critical reference for me in preparing a course on political ideologies.

This reader would make a decent companion to Andrew Heywood's excellent textbook, "Political Ideologies: An Introduction", 5th edition (2012), which I have also reviewed here on amazon. The contents of the two volumes don't match up perfectly; but they are pretty close -- close enough, at least, that they would work fairly well together. So, if you are preparing to teach a course on ideology, and planning on using Heywood's textbook (which you really should be using, by the way, since it is the best ideology textbook I've ever come across), then you might want to consider supplementing it with this reader, unless you can find a better one. This reader is far from perfect; but it does do a pretty decent job of providing a nice sampling of important political writings that are relevant to the major ideological traditions you'll be covering in your course, as well as a pretty good selection of writings about ideology itself, and about the question of whether ideology is still relevant in this day and age. Unless you are willing to take the time and put up with the hassle of compiling your own customized packet of selected readings, this is probably your best option.But, like I said, this reader is far from perfect. For one thing, one of the readings -- "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" [Reading 21] -- contains serious typographical errors: several lines in the text are mistakenly repeated. In most cases, this is little more than a minor annoyance; but at one point it actually results in the accidental insertion of a sentence into the text that was never meant to be there -- the rather illiberal assertion that: "Technical and professional education shall be compulsory." (This unfortunate wording was the result of the mangling of a passage in the Declaration that was supposed to read: "Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available....") A number of other minor typographical errors can be found scattered throughout the text of this reader; but none quite so egregious as this one.Setting aside typographical errors that can be blamed on inadequate proofreading, in my opinion, the main shortcoming of this text is in its selection of readings. While most of the works excerpted in this volume definitely belong in any collection of readings about ideology, a few are of questionable merit. For example, the excerpt that Festenstein and Kenny chose to use from Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" [Reading 72] is a rather prosaic passage about the toxicity of certain pesticides. Why use that particular passage and not a passage where Carson makes a more general argument for why we need to do a better job protecting the environment? Similarly, with a number of other readings, I had to scratch my head and wonder why the editors had chosen to excerpt this particular passage rather than a different passage from the same book, or from a different book by the same author, or perhaps even by a different author. And even in those cases where it was obvious why a particular passage was included, I often wondered why the editors chose to excerpt only that passage, and not also include some other, equally valuable passage from the same author. Perhaps my chief complaint about this reader is that it appeared to me that the editors had chosen quantity over quality -- they packed this book full of relatively short excerpts from lots of different authors, whereas I suspect that this reader would have been better had they included fewer, longer readings from only the most influential authors in each ideological tradition. But that's just a personal preference on my part. Your mileage may vary.The bottom line for me is that this is a pretty decent reader on ideology, fairly well suited to be used as a companion volume for an ideology textbook such as Heywood's "Political Ideologies: An Introduction"; but it has a number of shortcomings that preclude me from giving it a wholehearted recommendation. If you are teaching an ideology course, and you have the time and patience to create your own readings packet, that is probably your best option. But if that isn't an option for you, you could do a whole lot worse than use this reader.

if you are looking for a brief over view of political philosophy. it gives a good taste of different visions and is a good platform for increased study.

I found the authors explanations and summaries of the noted political ideologists of the past, very confusing. If it was not for my extremely talented professor who was teaching the class that used this as one of the text books, I would have not gotten much out of their contribution to the book. The ideologists works they copy and paste or reprint in the book are understandable. It does not touch on much of anything in the past 30 years. I do not recommend this book.

it was a good book.

Great

great