THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY MODERN SWITZERLAND

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC H. LERNER
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Good Government ◽  
History Of

What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

scholarly journals An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-484
Author(s):  
Carol Atack
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conjectural History

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

STRATEGY AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Thought

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-centuryrealpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

ANXIETIES OF DISTANCE: CODIF ICATION IN EARLY COLONIAL BENGAL

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON E. WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Continuous Flow ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of “Hindu” property law in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly “utilitarian” tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the “influence” of a particular school of British thinkers.

Jesuit Accommodation, Dissimulation, Mental Reservation

2017 ◽  
pp. 215-240
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Intellectual Identity ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
History Of

This chapter analyzes the role that accommodation, dissimulation, equivocation, and mental reservation played in Jesuit spirituality, theology, and culture. These doctrines came to represent a fundamental component of the religious, theological, and intellectual identity of the Society of Jesus. Indeed, Ignatius Loyola himself made discreción one of the principles differentiating the Society from all other Catholic religious orders. The chapter demonstrates the centrality that these forms of accommodation and dissimulation acquired in the political, religious, and intellectual history of the early modern world, becoming useful tools to articulate one’s political and religious allegiance and thus becoming an integral part of post-Reformation culture. As post-Reformation Catholicism assumed an increasingly global dimension, these doctrines became politically, spiritually, theologically, and hermeneutically necessary for the Catholic missionaries to approach, come to terms with, and adapt to geographically and culturally different contexts, places, and people.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document