In Idealism, Politics and History, Mr Kelly provides a wide-ranging but careful scholarly analysis of the meeting of two vital themes in the French Revolutionary period: intellectual and moral perceptions of history, and the patterns of political systems. He argues that a close exploration of the former is critical to our understanding of political philosophy at the end of the Age of Reason. The author traces his central preoccupations in a series of linked studies of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Each essay is in its own right an important contribution to the history of political ideas....

Originally published in 1976, this book was written specifically to guide students of political theory who want to understand Hegel's political ideas as they appear in The Phenomenology of Mind. Professor Shklar's commentary uses plain language and English translations of references wherever possible. The core of Hegel's argument is that freedom is the identity of the personal goals of individual citizens and the public ends of the polity as a whole. This is a dynamic process, in which all laws are created by each and all, and in turn expressed and realised in the minds and actions of every...

This 1976 book is concerned with the emergence, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, of a new theory of socio-economic development, based on the idea that the key factor in the developmental process was the way in which men made their living. Professor Meek traces the prehistory of the four stages theory, from its emergence with French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to its modification by critics and revisionists. He argues the theory was shaped by literature about savage societies, especially American Indian. It is well known that contemporary notions of savagery influenced...

For at least two centuries after its first appearance in 1573 Hotman's Francogallia influenced the way in which men regarded the European past and appraised the validity of political institutions. The intricate collation of the variorum Latin readings by Professor Giesey here demonstrates that nearly half the complete work consists of material added by Hotman to later editions in such a manner as substantially to modify the argument and balance of the original Francogallia. This definitive Latin edition contains a facing English translation by Professor Salmon, and a joint introduction in...

A. R. J. Turgot (1727 81), one of the greatest thinkers of the century of the Enlightenment, is known to political historians as a pioneer of the doctrine of universal progress, which he first put forward when a student at the Sorbonne in a lecture on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He is also well known to economists as the author of Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in which he anticipated - and in some respects surpassed - the theoretical system of classical political economy. In this volume, translations of these two works are printed together with a...

R. J. White's edition, which was originally published in 1967, made Fitzjames Stephen's classic available for the first time since 1914. The editor made use of the 1874 second edition which included Stephen's notes in reply to his original critics. Stephen's work is written as a systematic denunciation of John Stuart Mill's political thought. It is thus of great importance in the history of Utilitarianism, and also as the most forthright and systematic of the Victorian attacks on democracy. Stephen's work is also important for its repudiation of the progressive attitudes to religion and...

D. H. Lawrence expected The Rainbow to have 'a bit of a fight' before it was accepted, but 'The fight will have to be made, that is all'. It was suppressed, just over a month after publication, in November 1915. The American publisher would make thirteen further cuts and 'dribble out' the book quietly. In 1930 the British government would again consider suppressing a new printing of The Rainbow. Professor Mark Kinkead-Weekes gives the composition history and collates the surviving states of the text to assess the damage done to Lawrence's novel, and to provide a text as close to that which...

Hegel's doctrines of absolute negativity and 'the Concept' are among his most original contributions to philosophy and they constitute the systematic core of dialectical thought. Brady Bowman explores the interrelations between these doctrines, their implications for Hegel's critical understanding of classical logic and ontology, natural science and mathematics as forms of 'finite cognition', and their role in developing a positive, 'speculative' account of consciousness and its place in nature. As a means to this end, Bowman also re-examines Hegel's relations to Kant and pre-Kantian...