Ronald Beiner is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the editor of Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1982) and the author of Political Judgment (1983); What's the Matter with Liberalism? (1992), which was awarded the Canadian Political Science Association's C. B. Macpherson Prize in 1994; Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit (1997); Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship (2003); and Civil Religion (Cambridge, 2011).

• 1. First prologue: horizons of political reflection; 2. Second prologue: Freud, Weber, and political philosophy; 3. Hannah Arendt: the performativity of politics; 4. Michael Oakeshott: life's adventure; 5. Leo Strauss: the politics of philosophy; 6. Karl Löwith: in awe of the cosmos; 7. Excursus on nature and history in the Strauss–Löwith correspondence; 8. Eric Voegelin: modernity's vortex; 9. Simone Weil: the politics of the soul; 10. Hans-Georg Gadamer: philosophy without hubris; 11. Jürgen Habermas: politics as rational discourse; 12. Michel Foucault's carceral society; 13. Alasdair MacIntyre: fragmentation and wholeness; 14. Short excursus on the rise and decline of communitarianism as a political philosophy; 15. John Rawls and the death of political philosophy; 16. Richard Rorty: knocking philosophy off its pedestal; or, the death of political philosophy postmodernized; 17. Epilogue: on not throwing in the towel.

'In this extraordinarily learned, clear, and wide-ranging book, Ronald Beiner analyzes the contributions of twelve leading thinkers of the twentieth century to political philosophy, from Arendt to Rorty, Strauss to Foucault, and Oakeshott to Rawls … every reader, I believe, will be impressed by the humane seriousness that beats at the center of this impressive book, which seeks not to score points but to understand, eschewing scholarly quibbles in favor of the central question of the human good. Beiner makes for an outstanding guide through the intellectual life of the modern era.' Robert C. Bartlett, Boston College