Books by Paul Anthony Rahe

The latest volume in Paul Rahe's expansive history of Sparta's response to the challenges posed to its grand strategy

A companion volume to The Spartan Regime and The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta that explores the collapse of the Spartan-Athenian alliance

An authoritative and refreshingly original consideration of the government and culture of ancient Sparta and her place in Greek history For centuries, ancient Sparta has been glorified in song, fiction, and popular art. Yet the true nature of a civilization described as a combination of democracy and oligarchy by Aristotle, considered an ideal of liberty in the ages of Machiavelli and Rousseau, and viewed as a forerunner of the modern totalitarian state by many twentieth-century scholars has long remained a mystery. In a bold new approach to historical study, noted historian Paul Rahe attempts to unravel the Spartan riddle by deploying the regime-oriented political science of the ancient Greeks, pioneered by Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Polybius, in order to provide a more coherent picture of government, art, culture, and daily life in Lacedaemon than has previously appeared in print, and to explore the grand strategy the Spartans devised before the arrival of the Persians in the Aegean.

In 1989, the Cold War abruptly ended and it seemed as if the world was at last safe for democracy. But a spirit of uneasiness, discontent, and world-weariness soon arose and has persisted in Europe, in America, and elsewhere. Investigating the thinking of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, this title explores the nature of liberal democracy.

An examination of the works of Montesquieu that seeks to understand the shortcomings of the modern democratic state in light of this political thinker's insightful critique of commercial republicanism.