In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents an analysis of John Locke's critique of words.  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

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

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

Daniel Carey examines afresh the fundamental debate within the Enlightenment about human diversity. Three central figures - Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson - questioned whether human nature was fragmented by diverse and incommensurable customs and beliefs or unified by shared moral and religious principles.  Meer

Set against the broad context of philosophical arguments about group and state personality, Pluralism and the Personality of the State tells, for the first time, the history of political pluralism.  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

How did the French Revolution become thinkable? Keith Michael Baker, a leading authority on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, explores this question in his wide-ranging collection of essays.  Meer

With the rise of naturalism in the art of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance there developed an extensive and diverse literature about art which helped to explain, justify and shape its new aims.  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 book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates philosophical and social influences (such as scientism, practicalism and Pythagoreanism) reshaping the concept and, at the core of this reshaping, identifies a fundamental problem: the issue of whether psychological attributes really are quantitative.  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

Humanism and America provides a major study of the impact of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism upon the English colonization of America. The analysis is conducted through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad spectrum of writings on colonization, ranging from the works of Thomas More to those of the Virginia Company.  Meer

Pedagogy and Power is a volume of interdisciplinary essays which explores the political dimensions of Graeco-Roman education and of its subsequent models.  Meer

Self-Interest before Adam Smith inquires into the foundations of economic theory. It is generally assumed that the birth of modern economic science, marked by the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was the triumph of the 'selfish hypothesis' (the idea that self-interest is the motive of human action).  Meer

Rousseau and Geneva reconstructs the main aspects of Genevan socio-economic, political and religious thought in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Meer

An international team of four authors, led by distinguished philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, and leading scholar of the Vienna Circle, Thomas E.  Meer

In a wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic thought, Boris Wiseman demonstrates not only its centrality within his oeuvre but also the importance of Levi-Strauss for contemporary aesthetic enquiry.  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 rich and provocative study assesses Herbert Spencer's pivotal contribution to the emergence of liberal utilitarianism and shows that Spencer, as much as J.  Meer