Bøker i Ideas in Context-serien

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 highly acclaimed volume brings together some of the world's foremost historians of ideas to consider Machiavelli's political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition.

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.

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.

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 collection of essays by leading figures in philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher and to the institutional, political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place.

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.

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.

The distinguished team of international contributors to this 2001 volume explores the relationship between the history of political thought as a discipline, and the politics, history and culture of the various nations discussed, which include the UK, the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Central and Eastern Europe.

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 1993 collection of essays, all by pre-eminent exponents of the history of political thought, explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain. Organised on a broadly chronological basis, the topics addressed reflect the themes initiated and inspired by the work of the distinguished intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This landmark study provides conceptual and contextual analysis of political literature and debate in sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania and its contribution to early modern republicanism. It demonstrates the republican character of Polish discourse and the originality of Polish concepts such as the relationship between law, liberty and virtue.

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.

Republic of Women recaptures a lost chapter in the narrative of intellectual history. It tells the story of a transnational network of female scholars who were active members of the seventeenth-century republic of letters and demonstrates that this intellectual commonwealth was a much more eclectic and diverse assemblage than has been assumed. These seven scholars - Anna Maria van Schurman, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh - were philosophers, schoolteachers, reformers and mathematicians. They hailed from England, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands, and together with their male colleagues - men like Descartes, Huygens, Hartlib and Montaigne - they represented the spectrum of contemporary approaches to science, faith, politics and the advancement of learning. Carol Pal uses their collective biography to reconfigure the intellectual biography of early modern Europe, offering a new, expanded analysis of the seventeenth-century community of ideas.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of classical utilitarianism, was a seminal figure in the history of modern political thought. This lively monograph presents the numerous French connections of an emblematic British thinker. Perhaps more than any other intellectual of his time, Bentham engaged with contemporary events and people in France, even writing in French in the 1780s. Placing Bentham's thought in the context of the French-language Enlightenment through to the post-Revolutionary era, Emmanuelle de Champs makes the case for a historical study of 'Global Bentham'. Examining previously unpublished sources, she traces the circulation of Bentham's letters, friends, manuscripts, and books in the French-speaking world. This study in transnational intellectual history reveals how utilitarianism, as a doctrine, was both the product of, and a contribution to, French-language political thought at a key time in European history. The debates surrounding utilitarianism in France cast new light on the making of modern Liberalism.

Can there ever be trust between states? This study explores the concept of trust across different and sometimes antagonistic genres of international political thought during the seventeenth century. The natural law and reason of state traditions worked on different assumptions, but they mutually influenced each other. How have these traditions influenced the different concepts and discussions of trust-building? Bringing together international political thought and international law, Schroder analyses to what extent trust can be seen as one of the foundational concepts in the theorising of interstate relations in this decisive period. Despite the ongoing search for conditions of trust between states, we are still faced with the same structural problems. This study is therefore of interest not only to specialists and students of the early modern period, but also to everyone thinking about ways of overcoming conflicts which are aggravated by a lack of mutual trust.