Halifax: Complete Works

Author: J. P. Kenyon (editor)
Publisher: Pelican (Penguin Books), 1969
Condition: Softcover, yellowed pages, interior clean
Halifax was one of the first political theorists to represent politics as the art of the possible. Unlike Hobbes he relied more on the evidence of his own eyes than on any general postulate about human nature; and his experiences under the Stuarts and William III led him towards the conservative empiricism which he formulated most fully in his greatest works, The Character of a Trimmer. Halifax has a reputation as the seventeenth century's greatest cynic; but his Collected Works also place him firmly in the pragmatic English tradition of Burke.