This book examines the political thought of China, Greece, Israel, Rome, India, Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and also early Christianity. Each of these had its own priorities, based on a religious and philosophical perspective. This led to different ideas about who should govern, how to govern, and what government was for. admirably ambitious ... This is not a merely encyclopaedic account of ancient thought but a genuinely comparative analysis, with the constant attention to the divergences from basic similarities that creates the exciting sense of a single argument.