本书讨论工业革命前五个世纪英格兰社会的性质，以及英格兰与欧洲其余国家的关键差异。作者依据他本人对英格兰若干教区的详细研究、其他学者的各种地方性专题研究、历史人物的日记、法学文献、外国的史料，检讨了马克思、韦伯、麦考莱及当代历史学家和社会学家基于英格兰案例而提出的社会变迁的大框架。作者陈述了一种意见：对于英格兰的历史，一直存在着一种根本误读，并由此而影响了对于英国和美国现代社会的理解，也影响了关于工业化前提的当前理论。

《认真对待权利》是美国当代著名法理学家罗纳德·德沃金的成名之作，写作于20世纪60至70年代这个特定的历史阶段。
在此期间，种族歧视、越南战争、公民不服从等问题成为美国政治的核心。围绕着什么是法律，法律的目的是什么，谁在什么情况下应该遵守法律，在没有成文法依据、也没有先例的情况下法官如何审判案件等重大理论和实践问题，德沃金发表了自己的主张。
德沃金尖锐地批判了美国法律传统中的实证主义和实用主义，提出：政府必须平等地尊重和关心个人权利，不得为了社会福利或者社会利益牺牲人权。他在本书中论述的关于个人权利的法律与道德理论使他成为本领域最有影响的学者之一。

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone.
When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.