Bücher der Reihe Ideas in Context

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The early German Enlightenment is seen as a reform movement that broke free from traditional ties without falling into anti-Christian and extremist positions. But how did the works which were radical and critical of religion during this period come about? And how do they relate to the dominant 'moderate' Enlightenment?