The Great Transformation : How Modern Thinkers Reimagined the Classical View of Justice - Kevin Dooley

The Great Transformation

How Modern Thinkers Reimagined the Classical View of Justice

By: Kevin Dooley

Hardcover | 8 September 2026

At a Glance

Hardcover


$337.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $84.44 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 10 business days

Explores how modern redefinitions of key concepts such as nature, freedom, and virtue have reshaped our understanding of justice and altered how states assess right and wrong.

This book examines the definitional differences between classical and modern political theory as they relate to the constituent parts of justice. Since the earliest days of political philosophy, justice has been understood as the goal of the state. And most thinkers have spent a considerable time addressing the components of justice - nature, happiness, freedom, equality, and virtue. This book looks at these terms using both the classical and modern conceptions and argues that modern thinkers' redefinition of the terms has changed the way we conceive of justice and thus, transformed the ways states evaluate issues of right and wrong.

Industry Reviews

âThis book deftly explores how the classical teleological state has transformed into an ontological one in modern Western political philosophy. In that journey, has the state remained an institution to guarantee justice through securing happiness, equality, and freedom to its citizenry? At a time of worldwide citizen angst against the state, the book helps us wrestle with the question: if the state is unable to bring well-being to its citizens, is it unjust?â - Rekha Datta, Freed Endowed Chair in Social Sciences & Professor of Political Science, Monmouth University, USA.

âKevin Dooleyâs The Great Transformation serves as a necessary corrective to our persistent philosophical myopia that repeatedly leads us to judge classical thought through modern lenses. He encourages his readers to take the presumptions, purposes, and categories that inform the classical perspective of Plato and Aristotle seriously and to recognize that the shift to a modern perspective with its gaze fixed on the human individual rather than the human community is a philosophical choice with consequences that we should re-evaluate critically.â - Dr. Joseph H. Lane, Jr., Provost and Senior Vice President, Professor of Political Science, North Carolina Wesleyan University, USA.

âWithout directly critiquing modernist thought or imposing personal opinions upon us, Dooley meticulously traces the divergences between classical and modern political imaginaries in a fair and dispassionate manner, permitting the insufficiencies of the modern to reveal themselves naturally to the reader.â - Dr. John Ryan Feldmann, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, The New School for Social Research, USA.

More in Political Ideologies & Movements

Miriam's Full English : A Grand Tour of All Our Best Bits - Miriam Margolyes
Over the Rainbow : A Challenge to Cancel Culture - Drew Hutton

RRP $39.95

$31.75

21%
OFF
The American Way of Killing : The Invention of an Epidemic - Malcolm Gladwell
Is a River Alive? - Robert Macfarlane

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Day After : How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World - Brian Tyler Cohen
Children of the Third Reich : Three Pasts, Three Futures - Catrine Clay
Women, Race & Class : Penguin Modern Classics - Angela Y. Davis

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
How the World Works - Noam Chomsky

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Swimming in the Dark - Tomasz Jedrowski

RRP $22.99

$20.75

10%
OFF
How Not to Save the World : Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone - Anthea Lawson
The Communist Manifesto : Penguin Classics - Karl Marx

RRP $19.99

$16.75

16%
OFF
Mein Kampf - The Ford Translation : The New Ford Translation - Adolf Hitler
A People's Tragedy : The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 - Orlando Figes
Unleashed - Boris Johnson

Paperback

RRP $29.99

$24.99

17%
OFF
Weimar : Life on the Edge of Catastrophe - Katja Hoyer

RRP $69.99

$50.75

27%
OFF
Capital : Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 - Karl Marx

RRP $39.99

$33.75

16%
OFF