Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Right Book

For a short introduction to a very complicated and esoteric philosopher, this book is incredibly insightful, clear, and often funny. I needed a short introduction to this little-known and hardly understood precursor to Kant, and I love both the style and the way that Strathern makes incredibly complicated and difficult concepts easy to grasp, or as easy as anything I've read on Leibniz. I think you just have to accept that Leibniz represents a transition between the medieval mind and the modern, and he takes the metaphysical for granted on a much larger scale than we would consider believable today. (To say that he would be a good evangelical Christian of today would be inaccurate, too, I think, but I don't think you can understand Leibniz without first accepting where his head was.) Given that, he's very much in line with DesCartes' rationalism and Newton's mechanistic universe, both of which feed into his theories and make modern philosophy possible. As Strathern himself praises, we could never have Kant, Hegel, Schopernhauer, Nietzsche, or even Wittgenstein if it weren't for Leibniz and his amazing mind. As the book advertises itself, it's an extremely quick and enjoyable read and will be useful if you're in the middle of a major philosophical read (I'm halfway through Kant now) and need some information. It is part of a series of similarly quick intros to different names in philosophy.