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  3. Ideas in Context

The books in this series discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve.

  • General Editors: David Armitage, Richard Bourke, Adom Getachew, University of Chicago, Jennifer Pitts

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132 results in Ideas in Context

Page 6 of 7

The History of Political Thought in National Context
  • Edited by Dario Castiglione, Iain Hampsher-Monk
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    18 June 2001
  • In this 2001 volume a distinguished international team of contributors characterises the nature of, and developments in, the history of political thought in their respective countries. The essays scrutinise not only the different academic histories and methodological traditions on which the study of the history of political thought has drawn, but also its relationship to cultural and political debates within nations. This collection represents a major contribution to the history of ideas, in which political thought has always been central, whilst reflecting the disciplinary tensions - and national differences - of what remains a 'borderline' subject, located at the intersection of history, politics and philosophy. The different national characteristics taken on by political discourse, and the complex relationship these characteristics have to the aspirations of the discipline itself, are considered in these wide-ranging essays, which cover the history of political thought in the UK, the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Central and Eastern Europe.

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson
  • Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond
  • Daniel Carey
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    02 February 2006
  • Daniel Carey examines afresh the fundamental debate within the Enlightenment about human diversity. Three central figures - Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson - questioned whether human nature was fragmented by diverse and incommensurable customs and beliefs or unified by shared moral and religious principles. Locke's critique of innate ideas initiated the argument, claiming that no consensus existed in the world about morality or God's existence. Testimony of human difference established this point. His position was disputed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury who reinstated a Stoic account of mankind as inspired by common ethical convictions and an impulse toward the divine. Hutcheson attempted a difficult synthesis of these two opposing figures, respecting Locke's critique while articulating a moral sense that structured human nature. Daniel Carey concludes with an investigation of the relationship between these arguments and contemporary theories, and shows that current conflicting positions reflect long-standing differences that first emerged during the Enlightenment.

Jesuit Political Thought
  • The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–1630
  • Harro Höpfl
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 July 2004
  • Harro Höpfl presents here a full-length study of the single most influential organized group of scholars and pamphleteers in early modern Europe (1540–1630), namely the Jesuits. He explores the academic and political controversies in which they were engaged in and their contribution to academic discourse around ideas of 'the state' and 'politics'. He pays particular attention to their actual teaching concerning doctrines for whose menacing practical implications Jesuits generally were vilified: notably tyrannicide, the papal power to depose rulers, the legitimacy of 'Machiavellian' policies in dealing with heretics and the justifiability of breaking faith with heretics. Höpfl further explores the paradox of the Jesuits' political activities being at once the subject of conspiratorial fantasies but at the same time being widely acknowledged as among the foremost intellects of their time, with their thought freely cited and appropriated. This is an important work of scholarship.

Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment
  • T. J. Hochstrasser
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 September 2000
  • This major addition to Ideas in Context examines the development of natural law theories in the early stages of the Enlightenment in Germany and France. T. J. Hochstrasser investigates the influence exercised by theories of natural law from Grotius to Kant, with a comparative analysis of the important intellectual innovations in ethics and political philosophy of the time. Hochstrasser includes the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and his followers who evolved a natural law theory based on human sociability and reason, fostering a new methodology in German philosophy. This book assesses the first histories of political thought since ancient times, giving insights into the nature and influence of debate within eighteenth-century natural jurisprudence. Ambitious in range and conceptually sophisticated, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment will be of great interest to scholars in history, political thought, law and philosophy.

The Duel in Early Modern England
  • Civility, Politeness and Honour
  • Markku Peltonen
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    30 January 2003
  • Arguments about the place and practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. The distinguished intellectual historian Markku Peltonen examines this debate, and show how the moral and ideological status of duelling was discussed within a much larger cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness. The advocates of the duel, following Italian and French examples, contended that it maintained and enhanced politeness; its critics by contrast increasingly severed duelling from civility, and this separation became part of a vigorous attempt in the late seventeenth century and beyond to redefine civility, politeness and indeed the nature and evolution of Englishness. To understand the duel is to understand much more fully some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and Markku Peltonen's study will thus engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.

Elizabethan Rhetoric
  • Theory and Practice
  • Peter Mack
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 October 2002
  • Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in rhetoric and argument on a range of Elizabethan prose texts, including political orations, histories, romances, conduct manuals, privy council debates and personal letters. Elizabethan Rhetoric reconstructs the knowledge, skills and approaches which an Elizabethan would have acquired in order to participate in the political and religious debates of the time: the approaches to an audience, analysis and replication of textual structures, organisation of arguments and tactics for disputation. Study of the rhetorical codes and conventions in terms of which debates were conducted is currently a major area of historical and literary enquiry, and Mack provides a wealth of new information about what was taught and how these conventions were exploited in personal memoranda, court depositions, sermons and political and religious pamphlets. This important book will be invaluable for all those interested in the culture, literature and political history of the period.

Humanism and America
  • An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625
  • Andrew Fitzmaurice
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 February 2003
  • Humanism and America provides a major study of the impact of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism upon the English colonization of America. The analysis is conducted through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad spectrum of writings on colonization, ranging from the works of Thomas More to those of the Virginia Company. Andrew Fitzmaurice shows that English expansion was profoundly neo-classical in inspiration, and he excavates the distinctively humanist tradition that informed some central issues of colonization: the motivations of wealth and profit, honour and glory; the nature of and possibilities for liberty; and the problems of just title, including the dispossession of native Americans. Dr Fitzmaurice presents a colonial tradition which, counter to received wisdom, is often hostile to profit, nervous of dispossession and desirous of liberty. Only in the final chapters does he chart the rise of an aggressive, acquisitive and possessive colonial ideology.

Self-Interest before Adam Smith
  • A Genealogy of Economic Science
  • Pierre Force
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 September 2003
  • Self-Interest before Adam Smith inquires into the foundations of economic theory. It is generally assumed that the birth of modern economic science, marked by the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was the triumph of the 'selfish hypothesis' (the idea that self-interest is the motive of human action). Yet, as a neo-Epicurean idea, this hypothesis had been a matter of controversy for over a century and Smith opposed it from a neo-Stoic point of view. But how can the Epicurean principles of orthodox economic theory be reconciled with the Stoic principles of Adam Smith's philosophy? Pierre Force shows how Smith's theory refutes the 'selfish hypothesis' and integrates it at the same time. He also explains how Smith appropriated Rousseau's 'republican' critique of modern commercial society, and makes the case that the autonomy of economic science is an unintended consequence of Smith's 'republican' principles.

Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism
  • D. Weinstein
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    06 December 2007
  • In this study, David Weinstein argues that nineteenth-century English New Liberalism was considerably more indebted to classical English utilitarianism than the received view holds. T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, D. G. Ritchie and J. A. Hobson were liberal consequentialists who followed J. S. Mill in trying to accommodate robust, liberal moral rights with the normative goal of promoting self-realisation. Through careful interpretation of each, Weinstein shows how these theorists brought together themes from idealism, perfectionism and especially utilitarianism to create the new liberalism. Like Mill, they were committed to liberalising consequentialism and systematising liberalism. Because they were no less consequentialists than they were liberals, they constitute a greatly undervalued resource, Mill notwithstanding, for contemporary moral philosophers who remain dedicated to defending a coherent form of liberal consequentialism. The New Liberals had already travelled much of the philosophical ground that contemporary liberal consequentialists are unknowingly retravelling.

The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism
  • Robert Alun Jones
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 November 1999
  • Drawing on the kind of historicist perspective encouraged by Quentin Skinner and Richard Rorty, this book explores the development of Durkheim's social realism. Durkheim argued that social facts should be studied as real, concrete things but Professor Jones argues that his social realism was less a sociological method than a way of speaking and thinking about social phenomena through which Durkheim hoped to secure the allegiance of French citizens to the Third Republic. Professor Jones's book, based on many years' research in this area, takes advantage for the first time of newly discovered lecture notes from Durkheim's philosophy class of 1883–4 and explores the significance of German social science in Durkheim's thought. The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism will be of immense value to graduate students and scholars in sociology, social theory, social and political philosophy and history of ideas.

The Secularisation of the Confessional State
  • The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius
  • Ian Hunter
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007
  • Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius' work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke's arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state's duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.

The American Language of Rights
  • Richard A. Primus
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 July 1999
  • Richard A. Primus examines three crucial periods in American history (the late eighteenth century, the civil war and the 1950s and 1960s) in order to demonstrate how the conceptions of rights prevailing at each of these times grew out of reactions to contemporary social and political crises. His innovative approach sees rights language as grounded more in opposition to concrete social and political practices, than in the universalistic paradigms presented by many political philosophers. This study demonstrates the potency of the language of rights throughout American history, and looks for the first time at the impact of modern totalitarianism (in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) on American conceptions of rights. The American Language of Rights is a major contribution to contemporary political theory, of interest to scholars and students in politics and government, constitutional law, and American history.

The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
  • Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance
  • Penelope Deutscher
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 August 2008
  • Studies of Simone de Beauvoir have mostly concentrated on her literature, her life, and her famous 1949 work, The Second Sex, and the continued emphasis has been on Beauvoir's views on gender. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir places her theory of women's 'otherness' in the context of a number of contemporary theories on a similar subject. While gender takes its place among these, Professor Deutscher counterbalances its grip on our memory of Beauvoir's ideas by situating it in the context of our relationship to ageing, to generational difference, and to race and cultural difference. By differentiating the many aspects of 'otherness', Beauvoir revisited some of the concepts of reciprocity, ambiguity, and ethics for which she is best remembered.

Rival Enlightenments
  • Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany
  • Ian Hunter
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 January 2001
  • Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike.

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy
  • Hannah Dawson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    07 June 2007
  • In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents an analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in various writers. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy demonstrates that developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics.

Measurement in Psychology
  • A Critical History of a Methodological Concept
  • Joel Michell
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 June 1999
  • This book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates philosophical and social influences (such as scientism, practicalism and Pythagoreanism) reshaping the concept and, at the core of this reshaping, identifies a fundamental problem: the issue of whether psychological attributes really are quantitative. It argues that the idea of measurement now endorsed within psychology actually subverts attempts to establish a genuinely quantitative science and it urges a new direction. It relates views on measurement by thinkers such as Holder, Russell, Campbell and Nagel to earlier views, like those of Euclid and Oresme. Within the history of psychology, it considers contributions by Fechner, Cattell, Thorndike, Stevens and Suppes, among others. It also contains a non-technical exposition of conjoint measurement theory and recent foundational work by leading measurement theorist R. Duncan Luce.

Victorian Visions of Global Order
  • Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
  • Edited by Duncan Bell
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    15 November 2007
  • This wide-ranging and original 2007 study provides an insight into the climate of political thought during the lifespan of what was, at this time, the most powerful empire in history. A distinguished group of contributors explores the way in which thinkers in Britain theorised influential views about empire and international relations, exploring topics such as the evolution of international law; the ways in which the world was notionally divided into the 'civilised' and the 'barbarian'; the role of India in shaping visions of civil society; grandiose ideas about a global imperial state; the development of an array of radical critiques of empire; the varieties of liberal imperialism; and the rise and fall of free trade. Together, the chapters form an analysis of political thought in this context; both of the famous (Bentham, Mill, Marx, and Hobson) and of those who, whilst influential at the time, are all but forgotten today.

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought
  • Eric Nelson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    19 February 2004
  • The Greek Tradition in Republic Thought completely rewrites the standard history of republican political theory. It excavates an identifiably Greek strain of republican thought which attaches little importance to freedom as non-dependence and sees no intrinsic value in political participation. This tradition's central preoccupations are not honour and glory, but happiness (eudaimonia) and justice - defined, in Plato's terms, as the rule of the best men. This set of commitments yields as startling readiness to advocate the corrective redistribution of wealth, and even the outright abolition of private property. The Greek tradition was revived in England during the early sixteenth century and was broadly influential throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its exponents included Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Montesquieu and Thomas Jefferson, and it contributed significantly to the ideological underpinnings of the American Founding as well as the English Civil Wars.

French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville
  • Liberty in a Levelled Society?
  • Annelien de Dijn
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    21 February 2008
  • This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu's aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic 'corps intermédiaire' - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides an alternative context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.

Machiavelli and Empire
  • Mikael Hörnqvist
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    25 November 2004
  • Mikael Hörnqvist challenges us to rethink the overall meaning and importance of Machiavelli's political thinking. Machiavelli and Empire combines close textual analysis of The Prince and The Discourses with a broad historical approach, to establish the importance of empire-building and imperial strategy in Machiavelli's thought. The primary context of Machiavelli's work, Hörnqvist argues, is not the mirror-for-princes genre or medieval and Renaissance republicanism in general, but a tradition of Florentine imperialist republicanism dating back to the late thirteenth-century, based on the twin notions of liberty at home and empire abroad. Weaving together themes and topics drawn from contemporary Florentine political debate, Medicean ritual and Renaissance triumphalism, this study explores how Machiavelli in his chancery writings and theoretical works promoted the long standing aspirations of Florence to become a great and expanding empire, modelled on the example of the ancient Roman republic. This is a distinctive and important work.

Page 6 of 7