This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu's aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic 'corps intermédiaire' - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France.  Meer

The concept of toleration plays a central role in pluralistic societies. It designates a stance which permits conflicts over beliefs and practices to persist while at the same time defusing them, because it is based on reasons for coexistence in conflict - that is, in continuing dissension.  Meer

This book investigates the specific conception and descent of a language of 'degeneration' from 1848–1918, with particular reference to France, Italy and England.  Meer

This book discusses a central chapter in the history of free speech in the Western world. The nature and limits of freedom of speech prompted sophisticated debate in a wide range of areas in the early seventeenth century; it was one of the 'liberties of the subject' fought for by individuals and groups across the political landscape.  Meer

The Case for the Enlightenment is a comparative study of the emergence of Enlightenment in Scotland and in Naples. Challenging the tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, the distinguished intellectual historian John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations.  Meer

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.  Meer

In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability.  Meer

These two ambitious volumes from one of the world's most celebrated political philosophers 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.  Meer

Liberty, Right and Nature is a vibrant and powerful contribution to the recently renewed debate over natural rights and natural rights language. Annabel Brett argues persuasively that in order to understand the development of the concept we need to look at the way in which the Latin language of ius functioned in a wide range of philosophical contexts.  Meer

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.  Meer

In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability.  Meer

Markku Peltonen examines humanist and republican themes in English political thinking between the mid-sixteenth century and the Civil War. He challenges the dominant view that humanism fizzled out in the middle of the sixteenth century only to re-emerge during the 1650s in the writings of such classical republicans as James Harrington and John Milton.  Meer

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged as the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Originally published in 2007, Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes's ideas.  Meer

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents a comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than half a century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperial identity from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, using a full range of manuscript and printed sources.  Meer

Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies.  Meer

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state.  Meer

This wide-ranging and original 2007 study provides an insight into the climate of political thought during the lifespan of what was, at this time, the most powerful empire in history.  Meer

This pioneering study of Bertrand Russell's social and political thought deals with the years 1896 to 1938, and is the first book to embark on a thorough investigation of the intellectual and cultural context out of which Russell's ideas emerged.  Meer

Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics.  Meer

In this 2001 volume a distinguished international team of contributors characterises the nature of, and developments in, the history of political thought in their respective countries.  Meer