While the term "liberalism" was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until the late eighteenth century, the author argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society's norms, and then transmitted to the American colonies. In this study Annabel Patterson is particularly concerned with the means and agents of transmission, and with those who sought to ensure that the liberal canon would be preserved, dispersed and republished.

This study examines the development of natural law theories in the early stages of the Enlightenment in Germany and France. T. J. Hochstrasser investigates the influence of theories of natural law from Grotius to Kant, with a comparative analysis of important intellectual innovations in ethics and political philosophy. This book assesses the first histories of political thought, giving insights into eighteenth-century natural jurisprudence. Ambitious in range and conceptually sophisticated, it will be of great interest to scholars in history, political thought, law and philosophy.

This book reassesses the relationship between Enlightenment and religion in England. It has long been accepted that liberal, rational dissenters developed an Enlightenment agenda, but most literature on this topic is out of date. These interdisciplinary essays provide a fresh analysis of rational dissent within English Enlightenment culture from a variety of viewpoints. Its wide perspective and new research make Enlightenment and Religion an important and original contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

This book examines the genesis of Lutheran interest in natural philosophical issues by focusing on the reform of natural philosophy initiated by Philip Melanchthon. It suggests that Melanchthon transformed traditional natural philosophy into a specifically Lutheran one in an effort to refute civil disobedience and promote Luther's cause. It argues that an approach to natural philosophy by a dichotomy of "science" vs. "religion" is hazardous: natural philosophy should be understood as a study of nature, understood as God's creation, undertaken for Christian purposes.

Rousseau and Geneva reconstructs the main aspects of Genevan political and religious thought in the first half of the eighteenth century. In this way Dr. Rosenblatt contextualizes the development of Rousseau's thought from the First Discourse through to the Social Contract. Over time Rousseau has been adopted as a French thinker, but Dr. Rosenblatt points out that he is, in fact, a Genevan thinker and explains that it was his relationship with Geneva that played an integral part in his development into an original political thinker.

Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest...

Andrew Fitzmaurice reveals that English expansion was profoundly neo-classical in its inspiration, and that humanist traditions were extremely influential in the early development of the American colonies. Until now, accounts of early American colonization, and of European colonization in general, have placed great emphasis upon the links between colonization and the aggressive agendas of modern times claimed by historians and literary scholars.

Pierre Force studies the history of the concept of self-interest to understand its meaning by the time that Adam Smith used it as an axiom in The Wealth of Nations. He demonstrates that Smith, unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, never endorsed the idea that self-interest is the motivation behind all human action, although the "selfish hypothesis" did have a place in his doctrine. This book provides insight on classic puzzles of economic theory and is a major work from an outstanding scholar.

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

This book examines ideals of classical learning in order to make a significant and provocative contribution to current and past discussions on the role of education in society--why we teach and learn what we do. Essays by classicists, historians, philosophers and literary scholars argue for seeing the history of ancient education as an aspect of political theory and history, the figure of the teacher and of the student being inevitably implicated in various structures of intellectual, social and political authority.