James Harrington

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Political Thinker

James Harrington was a significant political and intellectual figure of the mid-seventeenth century, whose life and works embody the complex and contested web of political, religious and cultural ideas that lay at the heart of the English Revolution. His innovative constitutional proposals exercised a profound influence on political debate during that period and for at least two centuries thereafter, and his insights - particularly on democracy - remain relevant today. The complexity of Harrington’s thought has been under-appreciated by scholars in recent years due to the tendency to view him solely from the perspective of republicanism. While research into English republicanism has enriched accounts of seventeenth-century England and the history of political thought, it has also narrowed and obscured our perspective on Harrington. This book offers a broader account of Harrington’s life and work. It addresses Harrington’s contributions to the parliamentary cause and his role as the English agent of Charles I’s nephew, the Prince Elector Palatine. It takes seriously Harrington’s role as a literary figure and his engagement with historical, religious, scientific, and philosophical debates. It puts the case for Harrington as a radical political thinker, committed to democracy and social mobility. It also shows that in a variety of areas he deliberately pursued a middle path, or a balance, between different positions so as to promote reconciliation among a variety of groups. The broader view of Harrington offered here has implications both for our understanding of the seventeenth century and for the discipline of intellectual history.

The intellectual origins of the Royal Society-London or Oxford?

1968 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Oxford Group ◽  
The Invisible

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 at Gresham College. Even in the seventeenth century divergent views arose among its founders as to its intellectual origins and the events which led up to its foundation. So it is not surprising that echoes of these divergences were heard when the Society was celebrating its Tercentenary in 1960. The main points in debate were the extent of Francis Bacon’s influence on its foundation, and the respective contributions of the related groups in London and Oxford. Miss Syfret had already successfully challenged Thomas Birch’s view that the ‘Invisible College’ mentioned by Boyle and centring round Hartlib was in any direct way linked with the foundation of the Royal Society. Professor Douglas McKie in Origins and Founders brought both the London and Oxford groups into his account, and his and Miss Syfret’s interpretations seemed to fit one another (1). However, a booklet from Oxford written by Miss (now Dr) Margery Purver and Dr E. J. Bowen claimed that John Wilkins and the Oxford group were the only begetters of the Royal Society, and rejected John Wallis’s claims for the earlier London group around Gresham College. Dr Purver has elaborated the arguments in favour of this view in a recently published book (2). The Editor of Notes and Records has now asked me to put on record my own views, since I had already discussed this aspect of the intellectual history of the period in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965).

scholarly journals Ein Modell Politischer Diskursanalyse

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Model ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Cambridge School

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

Bulghaith al-Darawi and Barthélemy d'Herbelot: Readers of the Qur'an in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-120
Author(s):  
Pier Mattia Tommasino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Scholars

This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century Florence. Through the analysis of a very short and fascinating miscellaneous manuscript (BNCF, MS Magliabechi XXXIV.31), this article aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European orientalism, Italian intellectual history, and Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in the seventeenth century. Despite its fragmentary nature, the material, linguistic, and doctrinal features of this miscellaneous manuscript shed new light on the study of Oriental languages in seventeenth-century Florence and, especially, on Barthélemy d'Herbelot's (1625–1695) stay in Tuscany between 1666 and 1671, and the Muslim scholars he worked with and learned from during this time.

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.

Revising the History of Machiavellism: English Machiavellism and the Doctrine of Things Indifferent

1993 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.

scholarly journals JOHN STUART MILL: LAW, MORALITY, AND LIBERTY

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 879-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. S. JONES
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Laslett's edition of Locke, Pocock'sMachiavellian Moment, Skinner'sFoundations—have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakis's book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Press's flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.

scholarly journals Lucrezia Marinelli and Woman's Identity in Late Italian Renaissance

2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-39
Author(s):  
Prudence Allen ◽  
Filippo Salvatore
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Western Intellectual ◽  
Political Thinker

In this paper the Italian Humanist Lucrezia Marinelli (1571-1653) will be examined from the two complementary perspectives on her place in the late Italian Renaissance Studies and her contribution to the philosophy of woman. Marinelli is remarkable in both areas of intellectual history; and her relatively unknown contributions make it even more exciting to present to the English speaking public an assessment of her work. In Part I of this paper, Filippo Salvatore, examines her writing as an epic poet in the first part of the seventeenth century; in Part II Sr. Prudence Allen, considers her significance as a philosopher of the concept of woman at a crucial turning point in western intellectual history; finally, in Part III, Filippo Salvatore underlines Marinelli's significance as a political thinker.

scholarly journals Locke and Hate Speech Law

Locke Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 173-196
Author(s):  
J. K. Numao
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Hate speech is a high profile issue in many liberal democracies today. While commentaries by constitutional experts and jurists abound in the press, and by legal and political philosophers in academia, it is remarkable that there is far less contribution from students of history of political thought and intellectual history, especially of the early modern era, considering how largely the theme of religious toleration and intolerance featured in this period. Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, and more specifically Chapter 8 entitled ‘Toleration and Calumny’, helps to break this silence, making a case for how Enlightenment toleration theories from Locke to Voltaire might connect and enrich our discussions about hate speech today.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document