Bøger i Ideas in Context serien

How is a new state built? To what ideas, concepts and practices do authorities turn to produce and legitimise its legal and political system? And what if the state emerged through revolution, and sought to obliterate the legacy of the empire which preceded it? This book addresses these questions by looking at nineteenth-century Greek liberalism and the ways in which it engaged in reforms in the Greek state after independence from the Ottomans (c. 1830-1880). Liberalism after the Revolution offers an original perspective on this dynamic period in European history, and challenges the assumptions of Western-centric histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, and its relationship with the state. Michalis Sotiropoulos shows that, in this European periphery, liberals did not just transform liberalism into a practical mode of statecraft, they preserved liberalism's radical edge at a time when it was losing its appeal elsewhere in Europe.

This first comprehensive account of the utilitarians' historical thought intellectually resituates their conceptions of philosophy and politics, at a time when the past acquired new significances as both a means and object of study. Drawing on published and unpublished writings - and set against the intellectual backdrops of Scottish philosophical history, German and French historicism, romanticism, positivism, and the rise of social science and scientific history - Callum Barrell recovers the depth with which Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George Grote, and John Stuart Mill thought about history as a site of philosophy and politics. He argues that the utilitarians, contrary to their reputations as ahistorical and even antihistorical thinkers, developed complex frameworks in which to learn from and negotiate the past, inviting us to rethink the foundations of their ideas, as well as their place in - and relationship to - nineteenth-century philosophy and political thought.

The early German Enlightenment is seen as a reform movement that broke free from traditional ties without falling into anti-Christian and extremist positions. But how did the works which were radical and critical of religion during this period come about? And how do they relate to the dominant 'moderate' Enlightenment?

"Hegel and the Representative Constitution presents the first comprehensive historical discussion of the institutional dimension of G.W.F. Hegel's political thought. Elias Buchetmann traces this much-neglected aspect in unprecedented contextual detail and makes the case for reading the Philosophy of Right from 1820 as a contribution to the lively and widespread public debate on the constitutional question in contemporary Central Europe. Drawing on a broad range of primary source material, this volume illuminates the wider political discourse in post-Napoleonic Germany, carefully locates Hegel's institutional commitments within their immediate cultural and political context, and reveals him as something closer to a public intellectual. By exploring this indispensable thinker's demand for the constitutional protection of popular participation in government, it contributes beyond Hegel scholarship to shed new light on the history of democratic theory in early nineteenth-century Europe and encourages critical reflection on questions of representation today"--

"Exploring reason of state in a global monarchy, The Power of Necessity examines how thinkers and agents in the Spanish monarchy navigated the tension between political pragmatism and moral-religious principle. This tension lies at the very heart of Counter-Reformation reason of state. Nowhere was the need for pragmatic state management greater than in the overstretched Spanish Empire of the seventeenth century. However, pragmatic politics were problematic for a Catholic monarchy steeped in ideals of justice and divine justifications of power and kingship. Presenting a broad cast of characters from across Europe, and uniting published sources with a wide range of archival material, Lisa Kattenberg shows how non-canonical thinkers and agents confronted the political-moral dilemmas of their age by creatively employing the legitimizing power of necessity. Pioneering new ways of bridging the persistent gap between theory and practice in the history of political thought, she casts fresh light on the struggle to preserve the monarchy in a modernizing world. Lisa Kattenberg is Assistant Professor in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2019 and 2022, she was Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral dissertation, from which she developed this book, was awarded the Keetje Hodshon Award for the best doctoral thesis in history completed at a Dutch university during the past five years by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published broadly in Spanish, English and Dutch"--

"The emergence of experimental philosophy was one of the most significant developments in the early modern period. However, it is often overlooked in modern scholarship, despite being associated with leading figures such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, David Hume and Christian Wolff. Ranging from the early Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century to the uptake of experimental philosophy in Paris and Berlin in the eighteenth, this book provides new terms of reference for understanding early modern philosophy and science, and its eventual eclipse in the shadow of post-Kantian notions of empiricism and rationalism. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism is an integrated history of early modern experimental philosophy which challenges the rationalism and empiricism historiography that has dominated Anglophone history of philosophy for more than a century"--

In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy, and contemporary ideas of empire.

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 (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

Offering a vivid account of the revolutionary times through which they lived, this book revolutionises our understanding of Hobbes and Locke. Focused on their own era, it reveals a great deal about how religious toleration and religious politics developed within modern liberalism, and explores tensions that are with us still.

During the French Wars of Religion, the nature and identity of politics was the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Exploring early modern French uses of the word 'politique' and the statesman who practised this art, this book investigates questions of language and of power over the course of a tumultuous century.

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905.

Raymond Aron is one of the most important liberal political thinkers of the twentieth century. The first historical account of his place in the liberal tradition, this book will appeal to readers interested in modern French history and the intellectual history of the Cold War.

This first comprehensive account of revolutionary and socialist thought after France's nineteenth-century revolution with new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from around the world, Nicholls pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era.

This fundamental re-evaluation of the origins and importance of the idea of 'party' in British political thought and politics in the eighteenth century draws on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown and Edmund Burke to demonstrate that attitudes to party were more complex and penetrating than previously thought.

Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, including Burke, Constant, and Mill, this history of liberal political ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

How did the Victorian era - the epoch when the modern democratic state was made - understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity? Here, Gregory Conti examines how the Victorians conceived the representative and deliberative functions of the House of Commons and what it meant for parliament to be the 'mirror of the nation'.

Charts the evolution of 'theological utilitarianism', one of the most influential traditions in eighteenth-century Anglophone moral and political thought, and addresses the contested issue of whether there was an 'English Enlightenment', through the life and thought of moral philosopher and clergyman, William Paley (1743-1805).

The history of aesthetic theory - the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - matters to nearly every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Broad in its geographic scope yet grounded in original archival research, this book offers a strikingly new portrait of aesthetic theory's inception in the early eighteenth century.

While the efforts of George Eliot's fictional Mr Casaubon to create a 'Key to All Mythologies' may seem fruitless and obscure, Colin Kidd's interdisciplinary study excavates Casaubon's hinterland and illuminates the fierce ideological war which raged over the use of pagan myths to defend Christianity from radical Enlightenment thought.

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were two of the twentieth century's most influential and compelling political philosophers. Liisi Keedus explores how their shared background in Weimar Germany shaped their intellectual preoccupations, unravelling striking similarities, and genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers.

This comprehensive analysis of the foundations of Hugo Grotius' natural law theory assesses for the first time the importance of texts from classical antiquity, especially Roman law and a specifically Ciceronian brand of Stoicism, and explores the significance of the Roman tradition for Grotius, a humanist steeped in Roman law.

Drawing on hundreds of sources, this innovative book combines the history of scholarship, science, philosophy and religion to demonstrate how changing ideas about the history of ancient philosophy were central to intellectual change in seventeenth-century England, a period of immense significance for the history of European science and religion.

This book analyses the laws that shaped modern European empires from medieval times to the twentieth century. Its geographical scope is global, including the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Poles. Fitzmaurice focuses upon the use of the law of occupation to justify and critique the appropriation of territory.

The Reformation changed forever how the Eucharistic sacrament was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets - Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton - traces the literary afterlife of one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history, and illuminates its continued importance well into the seventeenth century.

In this book, David Summers provides an investigation of the philosophical and psychological notions invoked in this new theory and criticism.