Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Contexts

Honouring the work of Knud Haakonssen, this book consists of a series of studies that investigate the place of early modern natural law in the history of political thought. These studies follow Haakonssen’s lead in treating natural law as central to the formulation of doctrines of obligations and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. In doing so, they approach natural law less as a unified doctrine and much more as a field of cross-cutting idioms in which competing political and juridical programs were prosecuted for a variety of purposes. The studies thus investigate how natural law doctrines were formulated, received, and put to work in a wide array of cultural, political and institutional contexts, ranging from the political thought of the Dutch Arminians, Locke’s struggle with the concept of religious toleration, the political-jurisprudential thought of Pufendorf, Thomasius and Wolff in the German Empire, and the jurisprudential thought of Hume and Smith in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix ◽  
Deborah Baumgold
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

Ideas travel. The history of political thought as it has generally been studied is deeply interested in these forms of travel and in the transformations that occur along the way. Ideas of a social contract first crystallize in the England of Hobbes and Locke, and then travel in branching ways to Jefferson’s North America, Robespierre’s France, Kant’s Prussia, and elsewhere. In their travels, these ideas hybridize with others, are repurposed in new social contexts, and often take on political meanings deeply divergent from what their originators intended. Students of the history of political thought are acutely aware of these complexities in the development of European political ideas during the early modern and modern eras, given the centrality of such ideas for shaping the political worlds in which we now live....

scholarly journals GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA BECKER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

Sophocles' Antigone and the History of the Concept of Natural Law

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Burns
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
General Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Message

This paper focuses on two related questions. The first of these is a general question. Where are the origins of the concept of natural law to be located in the history of political thought? The second is more specific. Sophocles puts into the mouth of the eponymous heroine of his Antigone an argument justifying her disobedience to an edict of her uncle Creon, who forbade her to bury her brother Polyneices. Does this argument involve an appeal to the concept of natural law? The paper takes issue with the claim, first made by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, that Sophocles' Antigone is indeed an early example of the application of the concept of natural law in political argument and debate. This interpretation of the political message of the Antigone is inconsistent with what we know about Sophocles' attitude towards the fundamental questions of Athenian politics in the classical era of Periclean democracy during the fifth century BC.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

The History of British Political Thought: The Creation of a Center

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Hegemony ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Comprehensive History

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope.The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence.We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.

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.

scholarly journals The Use ofKairosin Renaissance Political Philosophy*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Paul
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
History Of

AbstractAlthough the Greek concept ofkairos (καιρός)has undergone a recent renewal of interest among scholars of Renaissance rhetoric, this revival has not yet been paralleled by its reception into the history of political thought. This article examines the meanings and uses of this important concept within the ancient Greek tradition, particularly in the works of Isocrates and Plutarch, in order to understand how it is employed by two of the most important political thinkers of the sixteenth century: Thomas Elyot and Niccolò Machiavelli. Through such an investigation this paper argues that an appreciation of the concept ofkairosand its use by Renaissance political writers provides a fuller understanding of the political philosophy of the period.

scholarly journals DEFOE, DISSENT, AND EARLY WHIG IDEOLOGY

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-614
Author(s):  
K. R. P. CLARK
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Revolution

ABSTRACTThe nature of Whig ideology at its formation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries continues to attract the attention of historians of political thought. This article contends that prevalent understandings of the taxonomy of the subject nevertheless still often remain secular, and do not fully attend to the religious constituencies of the authors involved. One key author was Daniel Defoe, who was credited with several anonymous pamphlets published after the Revolution of 1688. The effect of these attributions is to reinforce a homogenized picture of early Whig political ideology that fails to identify differences between authors who used similar terms such as ‘contract’, ‘resistance’, and ‘natural law’. This article de-attributes certain of these pamphlets, outlines the consequences for the history of political thought of that de-attribution, re-establishes Defoe's own political identity, and proposes that such a taxonomy should give more attention to religious difference.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document