This account of the basic theme of Vico's mature philosophy explores the question of whether philosophical theories can ever be more than an intellectual expression of the underlying beliefs of an age. The first complete English translation of the 1725 text, Vico's The First New Science ia now accessible to a broad, new readership. It is accompanied by a glossary, bibliography, chronology of Vico's life and expository introduction.

Lawson's Politica is a systematic treatise on politics in church and state and is arguably the most significant work of political theory to have been printed during the Restoration crisis of 1659-60. It was widely discussed during the seventeenth century and particularly the revolution of 1688-9. This new modern edition is based on, and corrects the first printed editions of 1660 and 1689, and contains an extensive introduction and notes designed to make this significant work accessible to both students and specialists.

This is the first complete new translation of Eduard Bernstein's (1850-1932) famous and influential work. It will provide students with an accurate and unabridged edition of the classic defense of democratic socialism and the first significant critique of revolutionary Marxism from within the socialist movement. First published in 1899, at the height of the Revisionist Debate, it argued that capitalism was not heading for the major crisis predicted by Marx, and that socialism could be achieved by piecemeal reform within a democratic constitutional framework. Bernstein's work is the focal...

This is a major new English-language edition of five central texts in the history of the political thought of the Dutch Revolt. Published between 1570-1590 these texts exemplify the development of the political ideas that motivated and legitimated resistance to Philip II. The introduction locates these ideas in their political and intellectual context and argues that they were inspired by the indigenous legacy of Dutch constitutionalism and civic consciousness.

This volume contains the political writings of Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), an acute defender of absolute monarchy and perhaps the most important patriarchal political theorist of the seventeenth century. The recent explosion of interest in women's history and the history of the family has greatly enhanced the audience for Filmer's work, and in this new edition Johann Sommerville provides accurate and accessible texts of his principal writings, accompanied by all the standard series features, including a concise introduction, chronology, guide to further reading and notes on Filmer's own...

This edition of the most significant political writings of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Knox presents accurate but accessible versions of all of his writings on the theme of rebellion, including his notorious First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and provides students and scholars alike with the means of tracing the evolution of his political radicalism and evaluating its impact. The first comprehensive edition of Knox's political writings, it sheds important new light on the political and religious thought of the Reformation period.

For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create images of collective identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the processes that make such accounts compelling for those who tell them? Why do some narratives acquire a kind of mythic status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimized by raiding headhunters in...

This is the first English translation of the most important work of political thought of the fifteenth century. The Catholic Concordance is the first major treatise to argue for consent through representative councils as a major prerequisite for legitimate law and government, and is the most learned and original work associated with the conciliar movement in the late medieval church. Cusa's arguments influenced such thinkers as Luther, Bruno and Locke, and Professor Sigmund's introduction places his work in its full historical and philosophical context.

A Holy Commonwealth was written in 1659 by the Puritan minister Richard Baxter (1615-91), and is a candid confession as to why a conservative Puritan fought for Parliament in the Civil War and gave his support to the Cromwells. Baxter publicly repudiated the work in 1670, and in 1683 the Oxford University authorities ordered it to be part of a book-burning that included the works of Hobbes and Milton. This modern edition makes available the work's unique perspective on the relation between Church and magistrate and the origins of the English Civil War.

This volume makes available for the first time in English the writings about the Holy Roman Empire by Marsiglio of Padua, one of the most influential and original political thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages. The Defensor minor is a restatement and defense of Marsiglio's best known work, the Defensor pacis, and De translatione Imperii applies Marsiglio's general intellectual framework to the question of the exercise of imperial power.