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Commentators have traditionally constructed Hobbes's thinking on representation too narrowly, as a self-contained area of his political theory. This book challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, which owes less to Hobbes s thought than to contemporary preconceptions of what counts as political thinking. In her powerful and original analysis, M nica Brito Vieira mines neglected strands of Hobbes's theory of representation, and reinstates it in a much wider pattern of Hobbes s theorizing about human thought and action in relation to widely varied images, roles and fictions. The result is a compelling portrait of how man's natural power to form representations through the imagination and artifice underpins his capacity to break away from nature, and fashion world that best suits his needs.

This book on the pre-history of democratisation shows how and why more modern attitudes to democracy started to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the language of parliamentarians, the author reconstructs and compares debates on the political role and representation of the people in Britain and Sweden. His analysis demonstrates not only the persistence of the classical, pejorative, conception of democracy but also the gradual revaluation of the notion prior to the French Revolution. The author analyses the clash between British and French conceptions of democracy as well as the first definitions of the sovereignty of Parliament as the sovereignty of the people. Furthermore, by placing parliamentary discourse in the context of public debates, he reveals the previously ignored evolutionary role that parliaments played in redefining the most crucial concept in Western political theory.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the radical political thought of the brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court, two eminent theorists from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic who played a pivotal role in the rise of commercial republicanism.

Focusing on the United States, France and the Dutch Republic in the revolutionary 1790s, The Citizenship Experiment explores the convergence and divergence of Atlantic citizenship ideals in light of the Haitian Revolution and the French revolutionary Terror.