"Barbara Ward does not make the mistake common to many economists and political theorists of attempting to interpret the present, still less to prophesy the future, in terms solely of the past. Though in each of her lectures she traces for each of her fields the development of political thought from the earliest times, the great importance of the series lies in her analysis of the present and her synthesis of the components into a broad picture which explains while it informs." Kwame Nkrumah, from the Foreword"