Politics

Born with the earliest forms of social organisation, politics took shape around questions of power, government and collective life. From Antiquity to the modern democracies, philosophers, sovereigns, jurists and reformers sought to define the foundations of authority and the duties of the citizen. Treatises, speeches, pamphlets and manifestos bear witness to the debates that accompanied changes of regime, revolutions and the rise of nation states. The history of political thought thus retraces the great transformations of the institutions and ideas that shaped the contemporary world.