Bücher der Reihe Ideas in Context

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.

The study relates legal developments to the broader fabric of eighteenth-century social and political theory, and offers a novel assessment of the character of the common law tradition and of Bentham's contribution to the ideology of reform.

This account of Gassendi's life and work offers a provocatively new perspective from which to view the influence of humanism on seventeenth-century thought. As Professor Joy makes clear, his reform of philosophy raised questions about the aims of science, which we ourselves are still asking.

The author chronicles the rise of Sociology, a hybrid of science and literary traditions, by discussing the lives and works of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth-century. The book presents a penetrating study of idealists grappling with reality when industrial society was in its infancy.

Pluralism and the Personality of the State tells the history of English political thought from 1900-1933 and concentrates on the work of the political pluralists. It explores the background of their work in the ideas of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the German jurist Otto von Gierke.

Drawing on a historicist perspective, this book explores the development of Durkheim's social realism using newly discovered material to explore the significance of German social science in Durkheim's thought. This book will be invaluable to graduate students and scholars in sociology, social theory, social and political philosophy and history of ideas.

Are human beings linked by a common nature, or are they fragmented by different cultural practices and values? These fundamental moral questions were debated in the Enlightenment by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. Daniel Carey explores the relationship between these founding arguments and contemporary disputes over cultural diversity and multiculturalism.

This major contribution to the history of European ideas investigates the philosophical and political significance of Judaism in the intellectual life of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Judaism and Enlightenment will interest scholars both of Jewish history and of toleration, enlightenment, and the emergence of modernity.

This sympathetic study of Bertrand Russell's social and political thought is the first to explore thoroughly the intellectual and cultural context from which it emerged. The result is a highly original view of an important and enduring figure, and an accessible account of a fascinating age.

David Armitage makes an outstanding contribution with this history of British conceptions of empire from the 1540s to the 1740s. He sheds light on major British political thinkers, and the relationship between Protestantism and empire, theories of property, liberty and political economy, and the emergence of the British identity. Winner of the History Today Book of the Year prize for 2000.

This book looks anew at two major themes in English political thought before the Civil War. Central ideas of both humanist and republican traditions are analysed within their proper context, and Dr Peltonen reveals the continuity of those traditions in a period when they are usually considered to have been dormant.

A study of the history of the concept of self-interest before Adam Smith, in order to understand what it meant when Adam Smith used it as an axiom in The Wealth of Nations. The author shows that Smith's theory refutes the 'selfish hypothesis' yet integrates it at the same time.

This book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates the philosophical and social influences reshaping the concept and identifies a fundamental problem: are psychological attributes really quantitative?

This book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross shows how each of the social science disciplines, while developing their inherited intellectual traditions, responded to change in historical consciousness, political needs, professional structures, and the conceptions of science available to them.

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought traces the influence of ancient Greek sources on the development of republican theory in Europe and America. It offers a substantial revision of standard narratives of the trajectory of republican political theory from the ancient to the modern world.