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This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.

Elucidating the evolution and current state of the field, the Handbook emphasizes the value of studying the history of political ideas to gain a critical perspective on our own embedded cultural predispositions. Authors analyze various intellectual schools, such as Stoicism, Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Republicanism, and Libertarianism, and discuss hermeneutical strategies to reading historical texts, including approaches from the Cambridge School and the Straussians. Providing a broad overview of Western political ideas, an international range of contributors also demonstrate cognizance of global theoretical movements and their significance for historical inquiry. They reexamine the standard canon of political thinkers in light of topics such as gender, colonization, and race, exploring the ideas of, amongst others, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and Marx.

Accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as established scholars, this Handbook is a crucial resource for academics in political science, philosophy, intellectual history, and economics, as well as scholars who study economic thought, law and politics. It will also appeal to scholars seeking a clear understanding of the key concepts that continue to influence contemporary theory and research across the social sciences.