The theme of this book is the crisis of the early modern state in eighteenth-century Britain. The revolt of the North American colonies and the simultaneous demand for wider religious toleration at home challenged the principles of sovereignty and obligation that underpinned arguments about the character of the state.  Meer

The apprehension of society as an aggregation of self-interested individuals, connected only by bonds of envy, competition, and exploitation, is a dominant modern concern, but one first systematically articulated during the European Enlightenment.  Meer

This book provides an overview of two hundred years of German economic thought, from the Staatswissenschaften of the eighteenth century to National Socialism and the Social Market.  Meer

Mikael Hörnqvist challenges us to rethink the overall meaning and importance of Machiavelli's political thinking. Machiavelli and Empire combines close textual analysis of The Prince and The Discourses with a broad historical approach, to establish the importance of empire-building and imperial strategy in Machiavelli's thought.  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 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.  Meer

This is a wide-ranging exploration of the similarities and differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese science and philosophy, concentrating on the period down to AD 300.  Meer

Between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, the language of politics underwent a radical transformation. The author argues that this transformation amounted to a 'revolution of politics', global in scope, and wide-ranging in its intellectual and moral implications.  Meer

How or what were doctors in the Renaissance trained to think, and how did they interpret the evidence at their disposal for making diagnoses and prognoses?  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

This 2010 text pursues Adam Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law both in historical context and through a twenty-first-century cosmopolitan lens, making this a major contribution not only to Smith studies but also to the history of cosmopolitan thought and to contemporary cosmopolitan discourse itself.  Meer

Civic humanism has been one of the most influential of all concepts in the history of ideas. In this volume, an eminent team of political theorists and historians of ideas have been brought together to reassess the impact on the subject of the pioneering work of Hans Baron (1966) and J.  Meer

Early Modern Liberalism rediscovers an important phase in the development of liberal thought. Despite the fact that 'liberalism' as a term was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until late in the eighteenth century, Annabel Patterson argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society's norms, and then transmitted to the American colonies.  Meer

This 1993 book deals with debates about science - its history, philosophy and moral value - in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period in which the 'modern' features of science developed.  Meer

This study investigates the philosophical and political significance of Judaism in the intellectual life of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Meer

Arguments about the place and practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. The distinguished intellectual historian Markku Peltonen examines this debate, and show how the moral and ideological status of duelling was discussed within a much larger cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness.  Meer

Models as Mediators discusses the ways in which models function in modern science, particularly in the fields of physics and economics. Models play a variety of roles in the sciences: they are used in the development, exploration and application of theories and in measurement methods.  Meer

Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in rhetoric and argument on a range of Elizabethan prose texts, including political orations, histories, romances, conduct manuals, privy council debates and personal letters.  Meer

This book defends the claim that politics is a linguistically constituted activity and shows that the concepts which inform political beliefs and behaviour undergo changes related to real political events.  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