Bøker i Ideas in Context-serien

Liberty Abroad is the first comprehensive critical study to consider the whole of John Stuart Mill's pronouncements on international relations. Varouxakis expertly combines Mill's own writings, the historical contexts in which they were produced, the political and philosophical preoccupations that prompted them, and how they were received among his contemporaries.

Toleration is an indispensable yet ambivalent concept in pluralistic societies. Is it based on mutual respect or on condescension? Why is it right to tolerate what is wrong? This book is the most comprehensive existing study of debates over toleration since antiquity and develops a theory for our time.

This book uncovers the centrality and complexity of notions of freedom in Montaigne's thought, thereby challenging prevailing accounts of the Essais as a forerunner of modern understandings of the self. It will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of early modern intellectual history and literature, and to cultural historians and philosophers.

A highly original account of why German and American intellectuals have been so strongly drawn to Max Weber's ideas. Of interest to scholars across a wide range of academic disciplines, as well as to those who simply want to understand why Weber mattered so much in the twentieth century.

Baring sheds fresh light on Derrida, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Drawing on new archival sources, Baring provides an intellectual history of the philosophies, institutions and movements of post-war France and a new interpretation of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times.

This book recovers the Scottish Enlightenment's forgotten commentary on the French Revolution. It argues that this commentary is both a major intellectual discussion in its own right and essential to our understanding of how Enlightenment philosophy and the heritage of Adam Smith were reinterpreted for post-revolutionary Europe.

In a vibrant contribution to the fields of global intellectual history and the history of South Asia, Christopher Bayly provides an essential background to the emergence of Indian democracy, showing how Indian thinkers used their own traditions along with Western political thought to demand justice, racial equality and political representation.

Explores German engagement with the Italian Renaissance in the decades from German unification to the Weimar republic.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, advocates of protection against foreign competition prevailed in a fierce controversy over international trade. They succeeded by portraying free trade as a British ideology and French free traders as traitors. This groundbreaking study is the first to examine this 'protectionist turn' in full.

This 2010 text considers Adam Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law both in historical context and through a contemporary cosmopolitan lens. The result is a major contribution to Smith studies, and to the history of cosmopolitan thought and contemporary cosmopolitan discourse itself.

Describing a central episode in the history of free speech, David Colclough demonstrates that in early seventeenth-century England people had a highly developed language in which to claim freedom of speech as a right and duty, uncovering an alternative tradition to the one that dominates much modern political theory.

This wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Levi-Strauss's aesthetic thought demonstrates not only its centrality within his overall oeuvre but also the importance of Levi-Strauss for contemporary aesthetic enquiry. Levi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics combines the different perspectives of anthropology, philosophy, aesthetic theory and literary criticism into a highly imaginative whole.

Did science and philosophy develop differently in ancient Greece and ancient China? If so, can we say why? This book offers answers to these questions with a series of detailed studies of cosmology, natural philosophy, mathematics and medicine, and by relating the science produced in each ancient civilisation to the values of the society in question.

Studying those intellectual pursuits that have shaped the understanding of Britain as an industrial society and continue to influence cultural responses to the moral questions posed by economic life, Donald Winch addresses the 'bitter argument between economists and human beings' provoked by Britain's industrial revolution.

Karl Marx's early writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works.

This rich and provocative study is the first to examine Herbert Spencer's critical role in the development of liberal utilitarian moral and political philosophy in the nineteenth century. While several scholars correctly see Mill as a founder of liberal utilitarianism, none have appreciated Spencer's equally important formative role.

Rousseau and Geneva reconstructs the main aspects of Genevan political and religious thought in the first half of the eighteenth century. In this way Dr Rosenblatt contextualizes the development of Rousseau's thought from the First Discourse through to the Social Contract.

Exploring the astonishing preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and culminating in an analysis of Locke's critique of words, Hannah Dawson examines a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century. The result is a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas.

This study of natural law theories in Germany and France in the early Enlightenment spans Grotius to Kant, giving insights into eighteenth-century natural jurisprudence. Ambitious in range and conceptually sophisticated, it will be of great interest to scholars in history, political thought, law and philosophy.

Approaching the Anatomy of Melancholy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and spiritual inquiry about melancholy, Gowland examines how Robert Burton exploited the moral psychology central to the Renaissance understanding of the condition to construct a critical vision of his intellectual and political environment.

Alan Cromartie gives an innovative account of English constitutional ideas from the mid-fifteenth century to the time of Charles I, showing how the emergence of grand claims for common law, the country's strange unwritten legal system, shaped England's cultural development.

This is the second in a sequence exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance, described in the TLS as 'one of the outstanding achievements of Renaissance studies in our time'. This 2001 book is of enormous significance both to the history of medicine and the history of European ideas in general.

Humanism and America is a major study of the impact of Renaissance humanism upon the English colonization of America. Andrew Fitzmaurice conducts his analysis through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad spectrum of writings, ranging from the works of Thomas More to those of the Virginia Company.

Christian Emden explores Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Challenging exclusively philosophical readings, this pioneering study sheds light on political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state.

Hobbes is widely acknowledged to be the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes's political and religious ideas, tracing the fate of his texts and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century.

This study 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 goal of promoting self-realisation.

In the first major study of twentieth-century feminism as an Anglo-American phenomenon, Lucy Delap offers a unique perspective on the politics of gender. By exploring the intellectual history and cultural politics of Anglo-American feminism Delap challenges the reader to re-think the nature of both the 'avant-garde' and 'feminism'.

Language, Mind and Nature is a 2007 text which fully reconstructs this artificial language movement. In so doing, it reveals a great deal about the beliefs and activities of those who sought to reform learning in seventeenth-century England.

This is the first book on the general history of US sociological research. It provides systematic archival, documentary, and interview data which question conventional views on research methods, developing our understanding of both the history of social thought, and the settings in which social research is produced.

This book is a comprehensive study of the history of the political thought of the Dutch Revolt (1555-90). It explores the development of the political ideas which motivated and legitimized the Dutch resistance against the government of Philip II in the Low Countries, and which became the ideological foundations of the Dutch Republic as it emerged as one of the main powers of Europe.