Bücher der Reihe Ideas in Context

This first comprehensive account of the utilitarians' historical thought intellectually resituates their conceptions of philosophy and politics, at a time when the past acquired new significances as both a means and object of study. Drawing on published and unpublished writings - and set against the intellectual backdrops of Scottish philosophical history, German and French historicism, romanticism, positivism, and the rise of social science and scientific history - Callum Barrell recovers the depth with which Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George Grote, and John Stuart Mill thought about history as a site of philosophy and politics. He argues that the utilitarians, contrary to their reputations as ahistorical and even antihistorical thinkers, developed complex frameworks in which to learn from and negotiate the past, inviting us to rethink the foundations of their ideas, as well as their place in - and relationship to - nineteenth-century philosophy and political thought.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy, and contemporary ideas of empire.

This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

Offering a vivid account of the revolutionary times through which they lived, this book revolutionises our understanding of Hobbes and Locke. Focused on their own era, it reveals a great deal about how religious toleration and religious politics developed within modern liberalism, and explores tensions that are with us still.

During the French Wars of Religion, the nature and identity of politics was the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Exploring early modern French uses of the word 'politique' and the statesman who practised this art, this book investigates questions of language and of power over the course of a tumultuous century.

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.

This first comprehensive account of revolutionary and socialist thought after France's nineteenth-century revolution with new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from around the world, Nicholls pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era.

Offering novel interpretations of canonical liberal authors, including Burke, Constant, and Mill, this history of liberal political ideas suggests a new paradigm for interpreting the development of modern political thought, inspiring fresh perspectives on historical issues from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

How did the Victorian era - the epoch when the modern democratic state was made - understand democracy, parliamentary representation, and diversity? Here, Gregory Conti examines how the Victorians conceived the representative and deliberative functions of the House of Commons and what it meant for parliament to be the 'mirror of the nation'.

Charts the evolution of 'theological utilitarianism', one of the most influential traditions in eighteenth-century Anglophone moral and political thought, and addresses the contested issue of whether there was an 'English Enlightenment', through the life and thought of moral philosopher and clergyman, William Paley (1743-1805).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this book, David Summers provides an investigation of the philosophical and psychological notions invoked in this new theory and criticism.

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.

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.