Throughout the book, Alan Ryan is aware of the danger of historicising the texts too much or too little. Push it too far one way, and they become mere historical documents, testifying to the alien nature of patterns of thought in societies quite remote from our own. Take it too far the other way, and you get a sort of Edwardian-style history of philosophy, in which Great Thinkers politely exchange ideas in a timeless seminar in the sky. Ryan gets it about right, I think: he fills in historical background, reminds us of underlying differences, but always maintains a sense of fundamental issues being addressed that, mutatis mutandis, may be issues for us too, today.

But which issues? Ryan is a thoughtful and receptive reader, yet in the end the focus is a little narrower than it might be, reflecting as it does his own intellectual — and, perhaps, political — preoccupations. He says that his aim is to study the answers given in the past to the question, "How can human beings best govern themselves?" As you think about that question, you realise that it leads you towards the area where political theory overlaps with political science — the area where constitutions get designed, where the implications of different kinds of democracy are examined, where the concept of representation is explored, and so on. Yet there are other questions which have also mattered for political theory: what is authority (as opposed to power), what is law (as opposed to, say, command, or moral precept), what is the state, what is justice, and so on. Of course such issues crop up repeatedly in this book; but they are not given the centre-stage position that Ryan allots to the problem of how best to organise the rule of the many by — as seems inevitable in all but the smallest political units — the few.

Ryan is a specialist in 19th- and early 20th-century thought, and it is in that period that the question he poses becomes most interesting and most complex. When representative democracy began really to gain power, so many other changes were also taking place that the concept of democracy became problematic in new ways: thinkers started worrying about the "despotism of public opinion", and so on. Ryan's question, "How can human beings best govern themselves?", now really does deserve its centre-stage position, and his accounts of how Mill and de Tocqueville grappled with those new problems are some of the finest chapters in the book.

But somehow, at the end of the 19th century, the impetus of Ryan's investigation begins to fail. He shifts to a mostly thematic approach, leaving many significant thinkers by the wayside: there is no proper treatment of writers such as Carl Schmitt or Hannah Arendt or Isaiah Berlin or Michael Oakeshott. Nor are all the relevant themes explored: there is nothing, for example, about the Catholic social thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which provided the basis for Christian Democrat movements in many parts of Europe. Instead, there is a somewhat predictable survey of imperialism, socialism, Marxism and fascism, followed by a few specimens of American democratic theorising (Dewey, Schumpeter, Rawls), closing finally with an essay on the present state of the world that is more homily than history of political thought.