Philip Barnard is Professor of English, University of Kansas.Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick.

A thoughtful and useful abridgement of an essential historical, political, and philosophical text. [Barnard and Shapiro] have managed to preserve the tone and arguments of the original while shedding much of the redundancy and lengthy quotations of external sources that can be off-putting and cumbersome for today's readers. The explanatory footnotes added to the text are helpful without being overbearing. --Katrin Schultheiss, George Washington University