Books by Roger Boesche

The First Great Political Realist is a succinct and penetrating analysis of one of the ancient world's foremost political realists, Kautilya. Kautilya's treatise Arthashastra stands as one of the great political books of the ancient world, its ideas on the science of politics strikingly similar to those of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and even Sun Tsu. Roger Boesche's excellent commentary on Kautilya's voluminous text draws out the essential realist arguments for modern political analysis and demonstrates the continued relevance of Kautilya's work to modern Indian strategic thinking and our understanding of the relationship between politics and economics. Striking a balance between textual analysis and secondary scholarship, Boesche's work will be an enduring contribution to the study of ancient Indian history, Eastern political thought, and international relations.

This text provides a survey of the way that prominent thinkers (ranging from Plato, Aristotle and Tacitus to Tocqueville, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt) have discussed the problem of tyrannical government from ancient Greece to the mid-20th century.

One of the country's foremost Tocqueville scholars, Roger Boesche has gathered together his writings on Tocqueville from the last quarter century. These essays focus on various specific aspects of Tocqueville's political thought.