Bøger i Ideas in Context serien

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.

Focusing on the transmission to the colonies of seventeenth-century English liberal ideas, Annabel Patterson rediscovers an important phase in the development of liberal thought. The author is particularly concerned with the ways in which liberal ideas were transmitted and with those who sought to ensure the survival of the liberal canon.

Arguments about the duel in early modern England were widespread. To understand duelling is to understand some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and this major new study will engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.

In this major contribution to the Ideas in Context series, Anne McLaren looks at how Elizabeth I managed to be queen, in the face of considerable male opposition. She examines the political context of Elizabeth's reign and demonstrates the continuities between it and the outbreak of the English civil war.

The definition of 'Englishness' has become the subject of considerable debate, and in this important contribution to Ideas in Context, Julia Stapleton looks at the work of one of the most wide-ranging and influential theorists of the English nation, Ernest Barker.

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical.

This book discusses the crisis of the early modern state in eighteenth-century Britain sparked off by the American revolution. It sets the crisis in its European context and traces the evolution of influential political ideas which continue to resonate today in the principles of 'one man, one vote' and 'freedom of thought'.

This book provides an overview of 200 years of German economic thought from the Staatswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to the Social Market. It highlights the important continuity of an essentially practical approach to economic thought, in business administration and in government policy.

Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. Exploring Neurath's biographical background as well as his theory of science, this timely publication is a major contribution to our understanding of analytical philosophy.

This book examines the radical transformation in the language of politics which took place between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. For three centuries politics enjoyed the status of the noblest human science, but it emerged from this 'revolution of politics' as an ignoble and sordid activity.

Imperial Sceptics provides a highly original analysis of the emergence of opposition to the British Empire. Tracing critical strands of anti-imperial thought from 1850 to the First World War, Gregory Claeys proposes a new chronology for the contours of resistance to imperial expansion, shedding fresh light on nineteenth-century political thought.

Defining Science, first published in 1993, deals with the major role of the historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell, in early Victorian debates about the nature of science and its moral and cultural value.

This book provides a way into understanding a momentous development in human intellectual history: the phenomenon of deductive argument in classical Greek mathematics. The argument rests upon a close description of the practices of Greek mathematics, principally the use of lettered diagrams and the regulated, formulaic use of language.

These two volumes present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. The volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory, from one of its most distinguished practitioners alive today.

This 2002 book explores the origins of systematic inquiry into science, historiography, and language in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and China. It investigates how and why research developed differently in these societies and illustrates the tensions that existed between state control and individual innovation and the different ways those tensions were resolved.

This major study of Hegel's intellectual development up to the writing of The Phenomonology of Spirit argues that his work is best understood in the context of the liberalisation of German Protestantism in the eighteenth century.

This book investigates theories of interpretation and meaning in Renaissance jurisprudence. How do they relate to the institutions of the law, especially pedagogical institutions? In what form were they published? An answer to these questions is sought through an investigation of Renaissance problems concerning the authority of interpreters.