Vincent Guillin uses the issue of sexual equality as a prism through which to examine important differences - epistemological, methodological and theoretical - between Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. He succeeds in showing how their differing conceptions of science and human nature influence and affect their respective approaches to philosophy and to the analysis of female (in)equality in particular. Guillin shines a bright searchlight into long-neglected aspects of both men's thinking - for example, Mill's proposal to construct an 'ethology', or science of character-formation, and...

Commentators have traditionally constructed Hobbes's thinking on representation too narrowly, as a self-contained area of his political theory. This book challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, which owes less to Hobbes's thought than to contemporary preconceptions of what counts as political thinking. In her powerful and original analysis, Monica Brito Vieira mines neglected strands of Hobbes's theory of representation, and reinstates it in a much wider pattern of Hobbes's theorizing about human thought and action in relation to widely varied images, roles and fictions. The result...

Analysing parliamentary references to the people, this book provides a more nuanced interpretation of eighteenth-century re-evaluations of democracy. It shows how interaction between parliamentarians and the public sphere in different political cultures produced more modern conceptions of the legitimacy of political power.

Contributors to this volume seek to reconsider the heritage of discourses of patriotism and national allegiance in East Central Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. It results from an international research project, "The Intellectual History of Patriotism and the Legacy of Composite States in East Central Europe," which brought together scholars to discuss the problem of patriotism in the light of the many levels of ethnic, cultural and political allegiances characterizing East Central Europe in early modern times. The authors analyze the complex process of the...

The Dutch seventeenth century, a 'Golden Age' ridden by intense ideological conflict, pioneered global trade, participatory politics and religious toleration. Its history is epitomized by the life and works of the brothers Johan (1622-1660) and Pieter de la Court (1618-1685), two successful textile entrepreneurs and radical republican theorists during the apex of Dutch primacy in world trade. This book explores the many facets of the brothers' political thought, focusing on their ground-breaking argument that commerce forms the mainstay of republican politics. With a contextual analysis that...

Making the Englishmen: Debates on National Identity 1550-1650 asks how Englishmen defined themselves at a time of profound change and uncertainty. It will seek to contextualise the ways in which Englishness came to be construed as free, plain and unCatholic, and situate this construction as part of a larger attempt to create a narrative which would distinguish them from the rest of Europe. But all such attempts were fraught with anxiety and contestation. The normative ideals of Englishness were constantly being undermined, affronted and ignored. In the disarray characteristic of the...

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes occupies a prominent place within the history of political thought. He stands at the forefront of both the discourses on human rights and on democratic constitutionalism. And yet, because of his theory of the constituent power he holds a somewhat ambivalent reputation as an advocate of permanent revolution. This state of reception is largely due to the fact that the better part of his work has hitherto not been edited outside of France. The edition Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes: The Essential Political Writings proposes to fill out this desideratum. It seeks to portray...

Few studies tracing the history of liberalism have taken into account that its reception in non-Western or westernising countries, in the form of the denial or acceptance of its core values and institutions, is an important aspect of the liberal tradition. In Intellectual Origins of the Republic: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the Genealogy of Liberalism in Turkey, Ӧzavcı investigates the histories of liberalism and nationalism in the late Russian and Ottoman Empires and early Republican Turkey through the prism of the life, ideas and times of the revolutionary writer Ahmet...

The notions of happiness and trust as cements of the social fabric and political legitimacy have a long history in Western political thought. However, despite the great contemporary relevance of both subjects, and burgeoning literatures in the social sciences around them, historians and historians of thought have, with some exceptions, unduly neglected them. In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, editors László Kontler and Mark Somos bring together twenty scholars from different generations and academic traditions to redress this lacuna by contextualising...

A purely political framework does not capture the complexity of the culture behind Italians’ struggle for liberty and independence during the Risorgimento (1815-1861). Roberto Romani identifies the sensibilities associated with each of the two main political programmes, Mazzini’s republicanism and moderatism, which in fact were comprehensive projects for a political, moral, and religious resurgence. The moderates’ espousal of reason entailed an ideal personality expressed by private virtue, self-possession, and a public morality informed by Catholicism, while Mazzini’s advocacy of...