Last weekend while browsing the philosophy section of the Georgetown Barnes and Nobles I was startled — and pleased — to see a familiar logo attached to some classic works. Regnery’s Gateway imprint is apparently still alive and doing quality work, putting out editions of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Marx’s Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, and Lenin’s State and Revolution. The volumes come with new introductions by (respectively) Roger Scruton, Peter Berkowitz, Serge Levitsky, Robert Conquest, and Richard Pipes — the upper tier of intellectuals embraced by the conservative movement. I may have reservations about some of them, but they’re all worth reading.

The Rousseau volume is especially worth checking out, not only for Scruton’s introduction but because this is Willmoore Kendall’s translation, which Regnery first published back in the ’50s. My only complaint is that they didn’t keep Kendall’s short introduction. (It’s only about two pages long and would hardly have interfered with Scruton’s intro.) I have a tattered first edition of the Kendall translation that I haven’t wanted to mark up, so I’m delighted there’s now a new printing.

I’ll have more to say once I’ve had a chance to read the introductions.

Filed under: Books, Philosophy