From Plato through the nineteenth century, the West could draw on comprehensive political visions to guide government and society. Now, for the first time in more than two thousand years, Tracy B. Strong contends, we have lost our foundational supports. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the state of political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has left us effectively "thinking without a banister." "Politics without Vision" takes up the work of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats-and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present time. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought - and the paths not taken - Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse. Confronting the widespread belief that political thought is on the decline, Strong puts forth a brilliant and provocative counterargument that in fact it has endured - without the benefit of outside support. A compelling rendering of contemporary political theory, "Politics without Vision" is sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.

特雷西·斯特朗(Tracy B. Strong)是聖地亞哥州加利福尼亞大學政治科學係的著名教授，他還是《政治學理論》雜誌的前編輯，並且齣版瞭許多書，包括《弗裏德裏剋·尼采和政治的變型》（Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration）、《讓雅剋盧梭和普通的政治學》（Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary）、《許多和唯一：關於現代世界中倫理學多元主義的宗教和世俗的觀點》（The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World.）