This book explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age narratives and other evolutionary accounts of the transition of mankind from primeval communality to regimes of ownership. The issue of the legitimacy of private ownership exercises the minds of the major political thinkers as well as theologians and jurists throughout the ages. The book gives full...

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged as the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Originally published in 2007, Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes's ideas. In the first book-length treatment of the topic for over forty years, Jon Parkin follows the fate of Hobbes's texts (particularly Leviathan) and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century, revealing the stakes in the critical discussion of the philosopher and his ideas. Revising the traditional view that Hobbes was simply rejected by...

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu's aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic 'corps intermediaire' - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular...

Christian Thomasius (1655 1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter...

This wide-ranging and original 2007 study provides an insight into the climate of political thought during the lifespan of what was, at this time, the most powerful empire in history. A distinguished group of contributors explores the way in which thinkers in Britain theorised influential views about empire and international relations, exploring topics such as the evolution of international law; the ways in which the world was notionally divided into the 'civilised' and the 'barbarian'; the role of India in shaping visions of civil society; grandiose ideas about a global imperial state; the...

This book is a comprehensive study of the history of the political thought of the Dutch Revolt (1555 90). It explores the development of the political ideas which motivated and legitimized the Dutch resistance against the government of Philip II in the Low Countries, and which became the ideological foundations of the Dutch Republic as it emerged as one of the main powers of Europe. It shows how notions of liberty, constitutionalism, representation and popular sovereignty were of central importance to the political thought and revolutionary events of the Dutch Revolt, giving rise to a...

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. The origins of modern society and politics are laid at the feet of zealous English protestants whose only intellectual debts are owed to Calvinist theology and the Bible. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical. She places puritanism back in its own historical milieu, showing puritans as the heirs of a complex...

In The Ambitions of Curiosity, G.E.R. Lloyd explores the origins and growth of systematic inquiry in Greece, China, and Mesopotamia. It asks such questions as what factors stimulated or inhibited this development? Whose interests were served? Who set the agenda? What was the role of the state in sponsoring, supporting or blocking research, in such areas as historiography, natural philosophy, medical research, astronomy, technology in all those fields. How were each of those fields defined and developed in different ancient societies? How did truly innovative thinkers persuade their own...

This book is a study of the reformation in ecclesiastical politics in twelfth-century England whereby the cathedral chapter, by gradually gaining control of more of its own wealth and resources, increased its power and emerged as a community largely independent of the bishop. The story illuminates an important period in the internal life of the Church, when the obligations and rights of individuals and institutions were being given ever more precise definition, and when new views on Church doctrine and canon law, as well as on royal and papal interests, became the concern of many of the...

How did the Society of Jesus develop and maintain a distinctive position on key questions of political thought such as ruler authority, the character and scope of positive law, the limits of obedience and the right to resist? Harro Hopfl presents a full-length study of the secular world--analyzed in its proper historical context--from a Jesuit perspective. Despite the significance of the Society of Jesus in Counter-Reformation Europe and beyond, important issues relating to the society's collective history remain misunderstood.