This book provides an overview of two hundred years of German economic thought from the Steetswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to National Socialism and the Social Market. Whereas Classical Economics emphasized value, distribution and production, German economic thought had a long-running tradition of human need and the varying conditions for order. By taking this latter perspective, the usual contrast of market and planning approaches to economic organization is subsumed by an approach that focuses on the construction of order in economic processes.

In this far-ranging and innovative study Christopher Berry explores the meanings and ramifications of the idea of luxury. Insights from political theory, philosophy and intellectual history are utilized in a sophisticated conceptual analysis that is complemented by a series of specific historical investigations. Dr. Berry suggests that the value attached to luxury is a crucial component in any society's self-understanding, and shows how luxury has changed from being essentially a negative term, threatening social virtue, to a guileless ploy supporting consumption.

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.

This study of Bertrand Russell's social and political thought deals with the years 1896 to 1938, and embarks on an investigation of the intellectual and cultural context out of which Russell's ideas emerged. Maintaining a sympathetic but critical stance towards Russell's almost innumerable political postures, and focusing in particular on his concern with the intellectual elite, the author renders that thought both plausible and coherent by placing its development against a significant historical background. As well as giving attention to the aspects of Russell's private life which helped...

Early modern England was a monarchy and the Englishman was a subject rather than a citizen. Scholars have assumed that those traditions of political thought that emphasize the citizen's active role exercised no influence in England between the mid-sixteenth century and the Civil War in the 1640s. Markku Peltonen challenges that view and argues that early modern Englishmen could characterize their life as one of participation rather than subjection and portrays their community as having several distinctively republican features.

This examination of a fundamental but often neglected aspect of the intellectual history of early modern Europe brings together philosophers, historians and political theorists from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, France and Germany. Despite the diversity of disciplines and national traditions represented, the individual contributions show a remarkable convergence around three themes: changes in the modes of moral education in early modern Europe, the emergence of new relations between conscience and law (particularly the law of the state), and the shared continuities and...

Scholars in the early seventeenth century who studied ancient Greek scientific theories often drew upon philology and history to reconstruct a more general picture of the Greek past. Gassendi's training as a humanist historiographer enabled him to formulate a conception of the history of philosophy in which the rationality of scientific and philosophical inquiry depended on the historical justifications which he developed for his beliefs. Professor Joy examines this conception and analyzes the nature of Gassendi's historical training, especially its relationship to his career as a physicist...

A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes to social change and law reform. Professor Lieberman's bold synthesis rests on a wide survey of legal materials and on a detailed discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries, the jurisprudence of Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment, the chief justiceship of Lord Mansfield, the penal theories of Eden and Romilly, and the legislative science of Jeremy Bentham. The study relates...

Defining Science deals with the major role of the historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell, in early Victorian debates about the nature of science and its moral and cultural value. Richard Yeo also examines the different forms or genres in which science was discussed in the public sphere--most crucially in the Victorian review journals, but also in biographical, historical and educational works. Analysis of the whole corpus of Whewell's work suggests that it be seen not only as an attempt to define science, but to clarify his own vocation as its leading critic.

This book provides a way to understand a momentous development in human intellectual history: the phenomenon of deductive argument in classical Greek mathematics. The argument rests on a close description of the practices of Greek mathematics, principally the use of lettered diagrams and the regulated, formulaic use of language.