Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory Under the English Republic

ISBN-13: 9780521883900 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 436 str.

Paul Anthony Rahe

Opis

Modern republicanism - distinguished from its classical counterpart by its commercial character and jealous distrust of those in power, by its use of representative institutions, and by its employment of a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances - owes an immense debt to the republican experiment conducted in England between 1649, when Charles I was executed, and 1660, when Charles II was crowned. Though abortive, this experiment left a legacy in the political science articulated both by its champions, John Milton, Marchamont Nehdham, and James Harrington, and by its sometime opponent and ultimate supporter Thomas Hobbes. This volume examines these four thinkers, situates them with regard to the novel species of republicanism first championed more than a century before by Niccolo Machiavelli, and examines the debt that he and they owed the Epicurean tradition in philosophy and the political science crafted by the Arab philosophers Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes.

Recenzje

'This erudite work presents a novel interpretation of Machiavelli's republicanism, and then seeks to trace its influence on the thought of several seventeenth-century English writers. … Rahe's book surveys an enormous swath of intellectual history and political thought … and relates much of it in novel, complex and challenging ways. … a seminal contribution' The Journal of the Review of Politics

Spis treści

Prologue: Machiavelli in the English Revolution; Part I. Machiavelli's New Republicanism: 1. Machiavelli's populist turn; 2. The ravages of an ambitious idleness; Part II. Revolutionary Aristotelianism: 3. The classical republicanism of John Milton; 4. The liberation of captive mind; Part III. Machiavellian Republicanism Anglicized: 5. Marchamont Nedham and the regicide republic; 6. Servant of the rump; 7. The good old cause; Part IV. Thomas Hobbes and The New Republicanism: 8. Thomas Hobbes' republican youth; 9. The making of a modern monarchist; 10. The very model of a modern moralist; 11. The Hobbesian Republicanism of James Harrington; Epilogue.