This book examines Renaissance modes of interpretation as they arise in legal contexts, and relates them to modern debates about meaning and its determination. By placing legal hermeneutic theories in their institutional and pedagogical contexts, the author is able to give an account of Renaissance thought showing how it operates in its own terms, and in relation to the thought of the medieval period. Renaissance legal thought is also compared to modern discussions of interpretation, allowing a critical examination of its coherence and consistency.

John Locke's theory of property is perhaps the most distinctive and the most influential aspect of his political theory. In this book James Tully uses an hermeneutical and analytical approach to offer a revolutionary revision of early modern theories of property, focusing particularly on that of Locke. Setting his analysis within the intellectual context of the seventeenth century, Professor Tully overturns the standard interpretations of Locke's theory, showing that it is not a justification of private property. Instead he shows it to be a theory of individual use rights within a framework...

This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published, and several appear here for the first time in print.

The theme of this book is the conflict that arose in the early nineteenth century between the literary and scientific intellectuals of Europe, as they competed for recognition as the chief analysts of the new industrial society in which they lived. Sociology was conceived as the third major discipline, a hybrid of the scientific and literary traditions. The author chronicles the rise of the new discipline by discussing the lives and works of the most prominent thinkers of the time, in England, France, and Germany. The book presents a penetrating study of idealists grappling with reality when...

The aspiration to relate the past "as it really happened" has been the central goal of American professional historians since the late nineteenth century. In this remarkable history of the profession, Peter Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity was elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the past century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writing of hundreds of American historians, this book is a richly textured account of what American historians have thought they were doing, or ought to be doing, when they wrote history--how their...

This volume studies the concept of a political 'language', of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought. The collection brings together a number of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars, on the four dominant languages in use in Europe between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are: the language of political Aristotelianism and the natural law; the language of classical republicanism; the language of commerce and...

This major study of Hegel's intellectual development up to the writing of The Phenomonology of Spirit argues that his work is best understood in the context of the liberalisation of German Protestantism in the eighteenth century.

This collection of essays, all by preeminent exponents of the history of political thought, explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain. Organized on a broadly chronological basis, the topics addressed by individual scholars reflect in general the themes initiated and inspired by the work of the distinguished intellectual historian, J. G. A. Pocock, for whom the collection is intended as a tribute. Each of the sixteen contributors have thought long and critically about Pocock's seminal contributions to the subject, and in each essay engages with the debates he has provoked....

Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from...

An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts brings together Professor Tully's most important and innovative statements on Locke in a systematic treatment of the latter's thought that is at once contextual and critical. Each essay has been rewritten and expanded for this volume, and each seeks to understand a theme of Locke's political philosophy by interpreting it in light of the complex contexts of early modern European political thought and practice. These historical studies are then used in a variety of ways to gain critical perspectives on the assumptions underlying current...