This distinctive collection of essays explores the relationship between the growth and development of civilization and the forms of social and political oppression that civilization permits and encourages as well as the forms of oppression that civilized societies unmask and seek to relieve. It offers fresh insights into the thought of political philosophers, including Locke, Montesquieu, Marx, Kant, Mill, and Rawls as well as the postmodernist response of Foucault and his successors to the fact of the domination of human by human.