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My questioners and critics have fastened on me some labels. Regardless of whether they are meant in criticism or in praise, I should like to contribute to their being torn off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 5 May 1818 in the quiet rural town of Trier, on the Western border of Prussia (now Germany), a son was born into a comfortable upper middle-class home on the river Moselle. Karl was the third of nine children born to Henriette and Hirschel Marx. In his youth he wrote lyric poetry; later he became a philosopher, newspaperman, historian, social scientist, and revolutionary. Today Marx is widely recognized as the most influential socialist thinker of the nineteenth century; in fact, until recently almost half the world's population lived in societies that claimed to be Marxist. But even in his own lifetime his ideas were modified and adapted to such a variety of circumstances that Marx himself denied being a Marxist. His ultimate concern was the development of human potential and freedom from exploitation; and his descriptions of the way social and political interrelations have been dehumanized by developments in systems of production are just as relevant today as when he first penned them, as these quotations indicate: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance" (Marlowe, 1978: "Prologue", 14-15). So speaks the stage villain "Machevil" in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Marlowe's tragedy is one of several English Renaissance plays featuring Machiavellian characters, such as Shakespeare's Iago, Richard III and Prince Hal, who contributed to the construction of Machiavelli's scandalous reputation. Today, the term Machiavellian is still synonymous with the deceit and ruthlessness deemed necessary for, or endemic to, effective politics. What was and still is shocking about Machiavellianism is its banishment of ethics from political life, a banishment which has the effect of instrumentalising religion, sanctioning the immoral means deemed necessary to achieve desirable ends, constructing the political realm as a realm which operates according to its own autonomous and often dubious rules, legitimising the concept of "reasons of state", separating facts from values, replacing idealism with a realism which comes close to cynicism, and demoting the conventional Christian virtues of love, mercy, honesty and humility by glamorising virtuosity, deceit, audacity, opportunism and will-power instead. The question which has consistently beset readers and critics of Machiavelli, however, is: how Machiavellian was Machiavelli? Is the "real" Machiavelli to be located beyond the popular perceptions or misperceptions of him? Or is the real Machiavelli himself open to a variety of interpretations? Given Machiavelli's own advice about the need to cultivate deceptive appearances as part of the "realistic" practice of politics, these questions have a particular relevance or, one might say, a particular "reality". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault is primarily a cultural theorist whose impact has been immense across many disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. Madness, sexuality, the history of medicine, the nature of authorship, literature and transgression, the practice of historiography, the development of the penitentiary, the nature of power and discourse in modern societies: these are just some of the manifold topics on which Foucault wrote with vision and insight. Foucault is often associated with other French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan as a founder of post-structuralism although, arguably, Foucault's work has been the more influential across a wider range of subjects, such as cultural studies, feminism, political theory, sociology, queer theory or cultural history. Foucault's work as a whole can best be classified according to three categories roughly corresponding to the chronological development of his thought: texts that employ a method he termed archaeology, texts of genealogy, and works concerned with the ethics of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francis Bacon was at various times a lawyer, judge, political theorist, statesman, natural philosopher, essayist, historian, rhetorician and utopian. Considered a consummate prose stylist and a prescient legal reformer, he was to become eminent for his ability to forecast the role that empirical science and technology would play in modern European society. Furthermore, he was astute (if not successful) in comprehending the political importance of a nascent scientific methodology, and the need for its development as a working institution within the framework of an English monarchy increasingly intertwined with the contributions, needs, and oscillations of mercantile capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]