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From earliest times Locke's writings have been the subject of controversy. An intellectual caught up in the politics of late 17th century England, his writings on politics reveal a man attempting to combine an analysis of the underlying principles of society with a deep commitment to a specific political stance and party. This study, first published in 1978 explains why Locke's vision of political life has continued to fascinate political thinkers of many different persuasions.

From earliest times Locke's writings have been the subject of controversy. An intellectual caught up in the politics of late 17th century England, his writings on politics reveal a man attempting to combine an analysis of the underlying principles of society with a deep commitment to a specific political stance and party. This study, first published in 1978 explains why Locke's vision of political life has continued to fascinate political thinkers of many different persuasions.

'ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF THE SUBJECT OF OPPOSITION IS THAT, although the problem of opposition is one of the oldest, very few works have ever dealt with it specifically and exclusively.' These introductory remarks to their 1968 volume by Ghiţa Ionescu and Isabel de Madariaga still hold remarkably true, despite a number of subsequent works and collections devoted to the subject. Their explanation was that although opposition is the altera pars of government it is a concept which is necessarily relative to that of power upon which political action centres and around which political science moulds itself.

It is a Recurrent Theme of Comments on Sammy Finer's writing that, like his talk, it dazzled. Perhaps, as he himself said of his Compurutiue Government text compared to his own lectures, the written version might be 'less picturesque and Mediterranean' but it could still enliven the most apparently dull topics within political science. Thus it may seem curious to draw attention to a work of his which betrays fewer of these qualities. The work is Five constitutions published in 1979.