The power of necessity

reason of state in the Spanish monarchy, c. 1590-1650

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 ...

The power of necessity

reason of state in the Spanish monarchy, c. 1590-1650

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 ...

The crisis of german historicism

the early political thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German-Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong ...

Adam Smith and the circles of sympathy

cosmopolitanism and moral theory

Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy pursues Adam Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law both in historical context and through a twenty-first century cosmopolitan lens, making this a major and timely contribution not only to Smith studies ...

Thinking about property

from antiquity to the Age of Revolution

Explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age ...

Rival enlightenments

civil and metaphysical philosophy in Early Modern Germany

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 ...

The constitutionalist revolution

an essay on the history of England, 1450-1642

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 first such ...

The worlds of renaissance melancholy

Robert Burton in context

Angus Gowland investigates the theory of melancholy and its many applications in the Renaissance by means of a wide-ranging contextual analysis of Robert Burton's encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621). Approaching the Anatomy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and ...

Jesuit political thought

the Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540-1630

Machiavelli and empire

Classical humanism and republicanism in english political thought

1570-1640

Judaismo and enlightenment

This study investigates the philosophical and political significance of Judaism in the intellectual life of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Adam Sutcliffe shows how the widespread and enthusiastic fascination with Judaism prevalent around 1650 was largely eclipsed a century later by attitudes of dismissal and ...

Self-interest before Adam Smith

a genealogy of economic science

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 ...